Saturday, October 10, 2009

Corruption and its effects

Besides strict penalties for the bribe payer and bribe taker, corruption can also lead to other effects.

For one, if an employee pays a bribe to the employee of a customer, the customer will be able to terminate the contract and also to sue the employee's company for any loss or damage.

As regards an employee bribe taker, besides losing his job, he is also subject to severe financial penalties. The employer can sue the employee for the value of any bribe received. This is on top of the penalty that can be imposed by a court which equals the value of the bribe received, under section 13 of the Prevention of Corruption Act. This "double punishment" was confirmed by the court in a case involving Carrefour Supermarket -

see Carrefour Singapore v Leong Wai Kay, [2006] 4 SLR 412 (the last set of characters is the citation of the case which tells a lawyer where to find the decision in a law library)

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