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

I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're covering Ecuador in our spotlight series on specific countries.

My guest is Bruce Horowitz.

Bruce is a founding partner of Paz Horowitz, Trace's partner firm in Ecuador, so thank you for that.

He has the Latin American Corporate Council Association's recommendation for anti-corruption and compliance work in Ecuador,

and he's doing really interesting work focused on the ethical, safe, and successful navigation of bribery, extortion, and coercion situations. Bruce, thanks so much for joining me.

You're welcome. Thanks for inviting.

So you have extraordinary insight into the governance landscape in Ecuador.

Can you start by giving us your perception living there of the level of commercial bribery that companies face.

Most of what people talk about is with the government, but there is business to business

bribery and it's either just bribery directly from one company to a person in another

company or it's a bribe plus a kickback. Those are the things that mainly happen

in the private sector. There's also sometimes extortion of people, and that does happen here.

But what we're mainly talking about is bribery and extortion businesses with the government. And that does exist, and it exists at all

levels during the last 10 years. It seemed to go down, at least extortion, from government officials

at lower levels in the national government. Not much happened at other levels.

There were some technological things that happened about keeping distances or no direct

communications between human beings on the two sides, and that also had some positive

effect and some negative effects. At the moment, there's a lot of heat on

people who were extorting from the government or accepting bribes. It's been in the news

for the last year and a half every day. And the other day, I saw the first four pages of the main local newspaper that was just

on corruption in government. So that's where we are right now.

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