Word: agent
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...most cases, though, the approaches are much more subtle: bribegiver and receiver never even meet, but deal through middlemen or agents. A company wanting to do business in a country where it is not known may seek out an agent, or an agent may approach it and claim?quite rightly?to know how to land contracts. Working?often luxuriously?on the fringes of the worlds of politics and business, middlemen are the indispensable Mr. Fixits for companies operating in foreign countries. Often natives of the country, the agents are well connected and know their way around the corridors of power...
...course, a good agent's role is not restricted to payoffs. He can set up appointments between important government officials and company representatives, help the firm chart its investment strategy, advise it on how to shape its bid and funnel back useful intelligence on government needs. All that is wholly ethical, and thus it often is next to impossible to determine how much of the agent's fee is a legitimate business expense and how much is passed on in bribes?particularly because the client companies have good reason for not trying to find out. If they do not know...
Among the middlemen in the Middle East, no one rates higher than Adnan Khashoggi, a fabulously wealthy Saudi Arabian who jets about his business in a plushly furnished private Boeing 727. He has at one time or another represented, among others, Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon and Chrysler. As Northrop's agent, he stands to collect a fee of $45 million for a single deal to sell fighter planes to Saudi Arabia. Northrop once reported that it had given $450,000 to Khashoggi to pass on to two Saudi air force generals; Khashoggi says he pocketed the money to "punish" Northrop...
True, there are times when having an agent can be a liability, as Grumman Corp. is now learning. The U.S. Navy helped to set up a deal under which Grumman will sell 80 F-14 Tomcat fighters to Iran. But Grumman officials were still worried about competition from McDonnell Douglas, so they bought a little extra insurance: they hired U.S.-based agents for $28 million to make sure that the deal went through. What Grumman did not know was that the agents it chose were in bad odor in Iran. When the Shah learned of the arrangement, he concluded that...
...corporation has agreed to make a payoff, the problem arises of how to transfer the money. Speed and secrecy are the obvious requirements for such exchanges, but sometimes the methods are astonishingly unsubtle. Part of the $7 million paid by Lockheed to Yoshio Kodama, the company's secret agent in Japan, arrived in yen-filled packing crates. Some of the rest was passed a bit more discreetly, in the form of checks made out to "bearer." Still, Kodama signed receipts for the equivalent of $2 million, and translations of the receipts were among documents given to a Senate subcommittee...