On today's podcast, I'm speaking with a lawyer with extraordinary corporate and compliance experience,

including as General Counsel for General Electric's Healthcare Division, and now in his current

role as Executive Vice President and General Counsel at AIG. But we'll be talking today about his current role as executive vice president and general counsel at AIG.

But we'll be talking today about his six years as general counsel at Siemens, beginning right

after that company's international bribery case wrapped up. Seaman's, as many of you will know,

continues to hold the record for the largest penalties in an international bribery case.

They paid a total of $1.6 billion in fines, penalties,

and disgorgement of profits to U.S. and German authorities. But I'll let our guest, Peter Solmson,

tell that story. Thank you for joining me, Peter. Thank you for having me.

The Siemens story is it was a real turning point for the compliance community. So why don't you

just sort of launch in and describe it? I think the most important lesson from the Siemens case is that after we cleaned

up, business got better. And you don't hear that very often. It's something that I think we knew at

GE, and we certainly know at AIG, that there's no opposition between doing it the right way and

business. Where it all started at Siemens was, and I talked to people who were there at the time,

was after the war.

The company's major markets were either destroyed or closed to it, so it went to more exotic locations

and felt that in order to succeed in those places, it had to follow what it thought

were local customs and pay bribes.

That was at least their expressed reasoning for starting, and they didn't stop quickly enough.

At least that's what the managers now in their 90s will tell you.

The idea there is that from the end of World War II, until this story broke, this was

standard operating procedure?

...