ISIS have lately attempted to resurge. At such a time, reports have emerged stating that Ericsson employees were paying bribes to ISIS terrorists in an attempt to gain access to the markets.
Ericsson, the Swedish telecom behemoth, has revealed that workers in Iraq paid bribes to traverse particular highways in 2019, in violation of company policy. According to Ericsson, it’s impossible to discount out the possibility that some of the bribes went to ISIS. Their CEO revealed this week that the company may have paid off extremists “in an effort to gain access to the market.”
The shares of the company dropped as a result of the announcement. Although paying for access in terrorist-infested nations is common, funding ISIS outright is a major humiliation for the firm.
This occurred while ISIS was still in control of sections of northwestern Iraq, and entrance to the Mosul area would have been difficult without paying a fee.
“With the means we have, we haven’t been able to determine the final recipients of these payments,” Ericsson CEO Borje Ekholm said in response to a corruption inquiry that stretched almost a year. Furthermore:
Ekholm’s comments came hours after the company released a statement late on Tuesday admitting “serious breaches of compliance rules and the company’s code of business ethics” regarding Ericsson employees, vendors and suppliers in Iraq between 2011 and 2019.
The following were discovered as a result of an internal inquiry into corruption-related improper conduct:
- providing a monetary donation without a specific recipient in mind;
- compensating a vendor for work that does not have a defined scope or documentation;
- making use of suppliers to execute cash payments;
- financing erroneous travel and costs;
- and the erroneous use of salespeople and consultants.
That is no longer the situation, as ISIS have lately attempted to resurge, but they do not control large areas of Iraq or Syria. However, this was definitely a dilemma in the past, and Ericsson may find it difficult to handle the situation at this time.
Owing to “detailed media inquiries from Swedish and international news outlets,” the corporation was forced to open the two-year investigation, and it eventually agreed.
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