Word: middlemen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi has tried to crack down on corruption. Recently, 17,000 Tehran shopkeepers, butchers, grocers and other small businessmen were arrested for price gouging. A new law combats pol-e-chah by making contractors submit affidavits revealing payments to local middlemen and influence peddlers. Various other laws aim at redistributing wealth. Businessmen must now turn over 20% of their profits to their workers, and employees are allowed to buy as much as 49% ownership in their companies...
...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...
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...
Since then, Preusser said, she has "spread out" her interests, and seen the root causes of problems plaguing Cambridge schools. Believing it "foolish" to work through middlemen, Preusser said, she decided to run for the council this year with the endorsement of the Cambridge Convention...
...prices, and millions of farmers innocently sold their grain cheaply before the deals were publicized and grain prices soared. These prices are set in the nation's grain markets, which can fluctuate wildly on the basis of psychological factors, including all manner of rumors and speculations. The many middlemen between the farm producer and the food consumer grasp flimsy excuses to raise prices and increase their already disproportionate share of each consumer dollar spent on foodstuffs...