A COMPANY has paid a fine of more than £200,000 after reporting itself to the authorities for failing to prevent bribery by a third party.
Cabling firm Brand-Rex Limited, of Glenrothes, Fife, contacted the Crown Office in June after an internal investigation revealed an abuse of a scheme it ran offering free holidays.
Between 2008 and 2012 Brand- Rex operated an incentive programme known as “Brand Breaks” for UK distributors and installers.
In return for meeting or exceeding sales targets, installers and distributors were eligible for varying degrees of rewards, including foreign holidays.
However, an independent installer of Brand-Rex products offered his company’s travel tickets to an employee of one of his customers.
The individual who ultimately received the tickets was in a position to influence decisions as to which company they purchased cabling from. Brand-Rex, which employs 300 people, became aware of the issue through an internal review and launched an extensive investigation conducted by external solicitors and forensic accountants.
The firm then made a self-report to Crown Office and accepted that they failed to act when they should have done, accepting responsibility for a contravention of Section 7 of the Bribery Act 2010.
Brand-Rex paid a fine of £212,800 after reaching an agreement with authorities, and the funds will be paid to the Scottish Consolidated Fund for reinvestment through the CashBack for Communities programme.
The company has taken steps to implement new policies and training to ensure that no unlawful conduct will take place in the future.
Linda Hamilton, Head of the Crown Office's Civil Recovery Unit, said: “Bribery and corruption can distort business and harm legitimate economic development. Companies are responsible for ensuring that they do not allow their employees or contractors to secure any commercial advantage through bribery.
“In appropriate circumstances such as this, where companies accept that they have failed to prevent bribery and take steps to ensure that it will not occur again, the self-reporting initiative allows for a civil settlement rather than criminal proceedings.
“I would urge any companies who uncover any instances of bribery to notify the Crown Office as soon as possible.
“The money recovered under the self-reporting initiative will be transferred to the Scottish Government to be reinvested back into Scottish communities."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here