Japan Is Pressed to Step Up Foreign Bribery Prosecutions

It was a rare event in a Japanese court: On Oct. 1, a former president and two other executives of a Tokyo company that had won a bid for a Hanoi transportation project admitted to bribing officials at Vietnam’s state-owned railway. The trio from Japan Transportation Consultants pleaded guilty to charges of offering 70 million yen ($650,000) in bribes. JTC declined to comment.

Such admissions of guilt seldom happen in Japan, where law enforcement has been lax on foreign bribery. The country isn’t viewed as having a problem with white-collar crime at home. When it comes to enforcement of laws against bribery overseas, however, Japan has a long way to go, according to a Transparency International report, Exporting Corruption, released on Oct. 23. The survey of 41 countries that have signed the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s antibribery convention ranked Japan in the bottom category, with “little or no enforcement” of laws against corruption overseas. Japanese executives working in other countries are solicited for bribes by officials on almost a daily basis, according to Aki Wakabayashi, head of Transparency International’s Japan branch. And sometimes they give in.