“Over the past two years, the U.S. government has collected almost a billion and a half dollars in fines in foreign bribery cases,” says Mark Mendelsohn, the Department of Justice prosecutor in charge of more than 100 ongoing cases, one of which culminated in a record seven-year prison term for the former CEO of a subsidiary of the Halliburton Corp., and another which ended in a record $800 million fine against the German giant Siemens. “There’s a whole world of conduct that rarely sees the light of day.”
In Black Money, FRONTLINE correspondent Lowell Bergman investigates this shadowy side of international business, shedding light on multinational companies that have routinely made secret payments — often referred to as “black money” — to win billions in business.
Disclosure (“none” means no position):