Welcome back to the podcast, Brib, Swindle or Steel. I'm Alexandra Ragi, and today I'm in Hong Kong for the ICAC Seventh Symposium. That's the Independent Commission Against Corruption. I'm speaking now with fellow keynote, Drago Koss. Drago is the chair of the OECD Working Group on Bribery.

Thank you for joining me.

Well, Aksand it's all the pleasure to talk to you.

Can you spend just a minute describing the working group and your role there?

We are the working group on bribery within the OECD.

It's a group of 44 member states and what we do is we are monitoring how our member

states are enforcing the OECD and the bribery convention.

And since we are the only one monitoring body in the world which is also really monitoring

the enforcement of the convention, we are having some unique features which are basically

countries have to report to us at least

once a year for each of their international bribery cases what they're doing with it.

We are asking them how do they motivate the companies?

Until just recently they were motivating them by only giving them some benefits in the criminal

proceedings which started against them for foreign

bribery offenses. But this will hopefully change soon because we are pushing hard now for the last

years that if companies are investing a lot of, let's say, the resources into establishing

compliance systems, then it's simply not right that they would have to wait a potential criminal proceeding to benefit from it.

So what we're trying to do is in the framework of the working group, we are developing new standards.

And hopefully one of the new standards will also be that countries have to motivate companies positively, which means that

countries will be asked to introduce measures which will recognize that companies are doing

something and that companies which will have really effective compliance systems and planes will

benefit from them in the form of admission to the public procurement processes, in the form

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