Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogi. Today we're talking about the college admissions scandal in the United States. I'm sure this will be fascinating to U.S. and non-U.S. listeners equally, but perhaps for very different reasons. My guest is Jonathan Turner.

Jonathan is Vice President, Ethics and Compliance at Smith and Nephew.

He's given excellent presentations on the college admissions scandal and particularly

what the compliance community can learn from it.

Jonathan, thank you for joining me.

Alexander, I'm happy to be here.

Can you spend just a couple of minutes to describe the scandal, especially for our non-U.S.

listeners, I know most Americans have been kind of mesmerized by it in the news.

This is one of those things that comes along periodically that really is an unexpected kind

of a scandal.

And when it unfolds, it seems like it should have been breathtakingly

obvious from the first place. In the American university system, there are lots of universities,

and some of them are extremely competitive. And in the way the admissions process works,

there might be literally tens of thousands of people applying for a few hundred slots. So very, very competitive environment.

And this scandal came about because a group of people made up of business leaders, a couple of

heads of law firms and investment banks, and a few fairly well-known celebrities, found a loophole

which they tried to exploit in order to get their children into prestigious

universities ahead of the line or outside of the normal requirements. This is a very

taboo thing in the U.S. process, and so lots of people have been watching it closely for twin

reasons. One, it's nice to see the rich and powerful get their comeuppance. But the second

one is that it showed a weakness in the system that I think people feared might be there, but really

got exploited in a way that they didn't anticipate. You talk about this longstanding weakness,

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