Welcome back to the podcast, brib, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about enforcement and compliance in Denmark.

My guest is Anders Worsso.

Anders is a Danish attorney and a founder of Magnuson, a Baltic Sea regional law firm.

His practice areas include

employment and industrial relations law, company and international commercial law, as well as

M&A and public procurement. Prior to his current position, Anders worked for many years on the operational

side of business, including two and a half years in Saudi Arabia, so he is very familiar

with the practical challenges of compliance. Magnuson has also been our Danish partner firm

for well over a decade, and we're grateful for their support. Thank you for joining me, Anders.

Thank you very much for having me, Alexandra. Can you talk a little bit about the level of

commercial bribery in Denmark? The perception is that there's very little corruption there, but we're really looking for an insider's perspective.

Overall, I think the perception is correct. Surely Denmark is both on the international rankings and also the perception of most people and certainly the Danes themselves or ourselves perceived as a very

non-corrupt country and a very sort of compliant country in all aspects.

That said, it's of course interesting to keep in mind that it's only just about 20 years ago

that legislation was changed and commercial bribery outside of Denmark was no longer tax deductible.

Obviously, it has always been known and sort of accepted that you could pay bribes outside of Denmark because that was what people expected and that's what you had to do to move around the world.

But we certainly don't do that sort of thing in Denmark.

The latter, I think, is also correct to a very large degree.

I would say that I do not think that the commercial bribery outside of Denmark is a history long gone.

I would actually suspect that especially the more challenging part of the world, Danish companies are no better than any other company around the world.

And they will probably move around, pay their facility payments in particular, just like everyone else, for good or for bad.

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