Alstom ran a decade of bribery to win power contracts and pleaded guilty for $772M

Alstom was a French engineering group whose power and grid businesses built plants and transmission lines around the world. For more than a decade, from 2000 to 2011, it won work in part by cheating: it paid bribes to foreign government officials to secure power contracts in Indonesia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Bahamas.

The mechanism was indirect. Alstom hired third-party consultants and used them as conduits, channelling roughly $75 million in bribes to officials while recording the payments as legitimate consulting fees. The contracts the bribes helped win were vast — worth about $3 billion in Indonesia, $2.85 billion in Egypt, $2.3 billion in Saudi Arabia and $1.5 billion in the Bahamas.

The scheme caught up with the company in the United States, whose authorities pursued it because parts of the conduct touched American jurisdiction. In December 2014 Alstom pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and agreed to pay a $772 million criminal penalty — at the time one of the largest FCPA fines ever imposed.

The case is now a textbook example of corruption risk in global project businesses. A company can win billions of contracts with millions in bribes, but when the conduct surfaces the bill dwarfs the gains: Alstom's penalty was roughly ten times what it had paid out, before counting the reputational damage that helped push it to sell its power business to General Electric in 2015.