The Pearl Initiative has won funding from the German conglomerate Siemens to ramp up its efforts to help businesses in the Arabian Gulf region improve transparency and work against corruption.
The Siemens Integrity Initiative, which has so far allocated US$100 million to fund similar transparency and anti-corruption groups, has awarded the Pearl Initiative $880,000 for a new regional programme to increase transparency and fight corporate corruption, said Imelda Dunlop, the executive director of the Pearl Initiative.
Siemens had been weighing proposals from groups for its latest $30m round of grants.
“The Siemens Integrity Initiative aims to back projects that encourage transparent practices in the interests of clean business and healthy competition, and help to build the right environment for sustainable economic growth,” said Dietmar Siersdorfer, chief executive of Siemens UAE and Middle East.
The Pearl Initiative has Dr Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed, Ruler of Sharjah, as its founding patron, and was launched with the backing of the United Nations. It is also backed by a companies including Crescent Group, Mazrui Holdings, Philips, PwC and Gulftainer.
The organisation has been in operation for four years and is a voluntary effort by companies to put transparency and anti-corruption practices in place in the region.
The new programme will be a more formal effort to develop an “integrity index” that can be used by entities including government departments to help evaluate companies’ practices when they are awarding contracts.
“If governments and companies want to look at large contracts and take an integrity measure into account, this will make that more easily available,” Ms Dunlop said. “When they want this information in the region now they often have to get bespoke research done. What we would like to do is have more of more of a standard, and to include private and family-held companies.”
The most effective tool governments have found to deal with bribery is legislative initiatives such as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which has extraterritorial reach that has hit a number of non-American companies in recent years, and regional governments have been looking to build on that experience.
“We are seeing some tightening up of the legislative environment and enforcement in the region,” said Ms Dunlop, who cited the recent companies act in the UAE as an example. “We can see that there are moves toward enhancing transparency where companies – including private companies – could be required to publish more information about their businesses. It is not entirely clear yet what that will entail. I do think there is a trend toward more transparency, [but] it would be a good thing to further strengthen legislation across the Gulf.”
The Siemens-funded Pearl programme, it is hoped, will help to guide the way towards that greater transparency.
amcauley@thenational.ae
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