preview

Reaction paper 2 – SNC-Lavalin case

Good Essays
Open Document

Case Overview
In December 2011 the board of directors of Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin, the largest engineering and construction company in Canada, received a whistleblower letter that alleging Riadh Ben Aissa, an executive vice-president, had secretly funneled money to members of Libya’s Gaddafi family.
In March SNC issued details of its own independent review, which found that president Pierre Duhaime breached the company’s code of ethics in approving more than $56 million of improper payments after the chief financial officer had declined to approve them.
In April the RCMP searched SNC-Lavalin’s head office in Montreal. Later that month Ben Aissa was arrested in Switzerland in connection with allegations of corruption of a public …show more content…

Second, if a Canadian company is seeking to do business in a corrupt country and conducting business is impossible without paying a bribe, then the only solution for such a company is not to do business there.
Personal assessment
The ethical question I want to address is: “Was it Ok for SNC-Lavalin, Canadian company, to secure business opportunities in North African countries by providing facilitation payments to agents?” Let’s look at it through the lens of different methods such as Utilitarianism and Deontological reasoning.
When we think of who the active and passive agents were in this case, it is clear that SNC’s top management was the main decision-maker. Facilitation agents and governmental structures in North African countries can also be defined as active agents. The passive agents were SNC’s shareholders.
Utilitarianism means to act in ways that maximize the total collective utility. It can be argued that SNC’s intention was to increase shareholders’ value by securing business contracts in the developing countries. And it is a well-known fact that in some of these countries the normal practice is to use agents to facilitate such transactions. But, being a Canadian company, SNC is much aware of the expected ethical standards that dictate that they should not have bribed officials. This is probably one of the places where SNC shouldn’t be doing business.
SNC took a purely accounting perspective when considering to hire facilitation

Get Access
Related
Get Access