This is one of the aspects of the Islamic world that I do not like. Bartering/bribing/coercing is super common, and I fail to see how it could have any positive benefit at all.
My home country has huge Islamic influences, and it is prevalent there as well. All it does is destroy your sense of trust for any authority, and without even minimal trust no one ever tries to improve things, a vicious cycle.
I'm from Iran but I actually have been living in the US for 12+ years. In my home country bribery is common but what is worse is finding the right person who has connections to bribe. My dad was in construction business (roads, bridges and dams) and he worked hard but he was always cash flow negative even though he was bribing generously. It turned out he could have been bribing the boss directly instead of bribing the employee and employee bribing the boss.
What's funny is my dad is retired now but the boss and the guy he was bribing are both living happily in Toronto, Canada thanks to Canada's investment visa and basically no rules for dirty money.
> but the boss and the guy he was bribing are both living happily in Toronto, Canada
Yep. Similar, where I am (London UK) is, depending on how you measure it, not corrupt at all, or staggeringly corrupt.
Not corrupt at all, because it's nigh-impossible to bribe your way out of speeding fine or into a planning approval.
Staggeringly corrupt because it's a huge parking lot for dirty money from secretive sources around the world, mostly stored in real estate, and thus facilitates massive global corruption.
The UK has been relatively proactive regarding money laundering. It was actually one of the first countries to mandate a publicly accessible company registry that includes beneficial owners.
Canada is on the other end of the spectrum in terms of both transparency requirements and enforcement, so much so that the term "snow washing" has become part of the vernacular internationally, and even garnered its own Wikipedia entry. There are developing countries (e.g., Ghana) that have more robust anti-money laundering regimes.
Yup, I'm originally from a country where it's a common saying between people that there are "laws that stick" and "laws that don't stick". The only value of a law is in its enforcement, watching the flow of oligarchs' money towards City of London tells me enforcement is still very subpar.
> An unexplained wealth order (UWO) is a type of court order issued by a British court to compel the target to reveal the sources of their unexplained wealth. UWOs were introduced by sections 1–2 of the Criminal Finances Act 2017
> In June 2003, Abramovich became the owner of the companies that control Chelsea Football Club in West London.
I don't understand, would Putin ordering the purchase mage it illegit?
It's of course possible that Abramovich got his riches by illegal means. Nevertheless buying a football club seems like a normal thing to do (for rich people).
Canada is really surprisingly blatant about their lack of concern for the origin of money. Your story sort of reminds me of the craze of Chinese millionaires buying homes in Vancouver and British Columbia as safe haven assets.
When I did some overland traveling in Africa this was extremely common.
At the border crossing between Mauritania and Senegal there was a little "immigration" hut where you'd have to get your passport stamped. One very well dressed official in Ray-Bans just took people's passports and set them on a pile and they'd stay there for hours unless you'd slip in a bank note.
All he had to was stamp them, nothing else. Other travellers I was with refused to "take part in this corruption", I happily gave the guy a fee and was on my way. It's either that or standing around in the scorching sun for hours mobbed by begging locals.
At every checkpoint you'd have police / military with Kalashnikovs asking for a "petit cadeau" (little gift). At first they're very intimidating but after a while you realise they're totally harmless and will just let you pass if you just say "no sorry". Most are extremely bored and just happy to see you. In the Western Sahara they'd even invite us to some tea, teach us a few words of Arabic and one of them even asked "you, give me laptop?" Yeah sure buddy! Preloading one with a keylogger could be fun!
One guy traveling with us in a car told the story of when he first drove in Africa. In Senegal he got pulled over and police fined him 50$ cause he didn't have a danger triangle. The next year he got pulled over again and proudly showed them the triangle but he was fined 50$ again cause he didn't have 2x danger triangles. You don't know whether to laugh or cry. Good times.
My dad (a retired airline pilot) ran a flight school in Kenya at some point before I was born. He was a high-up examiner in the Kenyan aviation scene. He eventually left after being shot at for not taking bribes, and routinely saw e.g. partially sighted pilots saying things like "Tally-ho chaps I'm coming in" on the radio at their favourite light aircraft airfield and the runway / taxiway just emptying as everyone legged it.
This heavily reminds me of Papers, Please [1] by Lucas Pope. Great game and a good example of how to tell a story through mechanics rather than a linear storyline.
the rest of your text makes it abundantly clear that it was a bribe, so why call it a fee? Unless you got an official receipt for it, which I highly doubt...
You're right. It just doesn't seem right to use the same word for both 10$ that saves you hours of tedium and a suitcase with a hundred grand to get a building permit.
When I have to get my passport renewed it's possible to pay a higher fee to get it done quicker. The difference is it ends up in the state coffers vs in some official's pocket. But in the end it's just to jump the queue, same thing.
Well yeah, there are smaller and larger bribes... OTOH "Baksheesh" for me is more like a tip that you would give to a waiter in a restaurant, which is the mildest form of corruption possible (if it can even be called that).
A fee to get your passport quicker isn't the same as a bribe for me - after all, you can also pay extra to get a better seat on a flight, better service and be able to board sooner, would you consider that bribing the airline? Whereas paying someone at the gate to upgrade you to business class would be bribery...
I think there's a real difference between a "facilitation payment" and a "bribe". In each case, the official intends to use their position for personal benefit - and yes that is clearly problematic - but in the former case, the payer has no corrupt intent.
It’s just the scale. A “facilitation payment” is a small bribe.
The payer of any bribe is participating in a corrupt system. Paying $1 to get your passport stamped is small, but it still is bad. Think of all the poor people who don’t have $1 and get hosed by this.
No, it's really not the scale - it's about intent. $100 to a customs officer to avoid being held up for a day when you've done nothing wrong is totally different from $100 to a customs officer to overlook unpaid duties on a suitcase full of goods.
It's a form of direct taxation. In most of these countries officials literally officially get paid $50 a month as their salary. But their position allows them to directly "tax" people in the ways being described here. Their boss and their bosses boss will probably be in on it and be receiving a cut.
Ok, if it's already calculated into the officials' salaries (the same way as waiters get paid less, because they get tips from customers), then they should at least give you a receipt for this "tax payment"...
I'm confused. Calling it a "facilitation payment" feels like a subcategory of bribes to me, and would be a form of corruption. Can you explain why you would see "facilitation payments" as not being corrupt?
A facilitation payment is a payment made to an official to do their job.
Real personal example: I'm trying to register my newly-purchased car with the RTO (c.f. DMV) in Bangalore. I have all the paperwork I need. The car is mine, my address details are correct, my proofs of address are sufficient, my fee is paid.
Only there are continual requests for more paperwork: different proofs of address, proofs of prior addresses in other countries, proofs that are officially stamped etc etc none of which are formally necessary.
On the advice of the car dealer, I paid INR 4,000 in facilitation money and suddenly the paperwork is in order and my car is registered.
The official's intent is to extort me for money, but my intent is just to comply with the law that requires my car to be registered. I'm willing and able to provide all the required paperwork. My intent is not corrupt.
If I was trying to register a car that was stolen, and I was paying the RTO official to overlook the inadequacies in my documentation, that would be a bribe. My intent is to pay the official not to do their job.
Ha. That still sounds sketchy. It would be like going to a DMV in the states to get your license and slipping a $20 to person who gives your driving test to get out of parallel parking or something....
It’s not bribing your way out of a crime or something but it is still dodgy and corrupt.
If you're paying someone $20 to get out of parallel parking in your driving test; that's a bribe.
If you're paying someone $20 to pass your driving test after you performed a perfect parallel parking maneuver but they baselessly claimed you were "too far from the curb"; that's a facilitation payment.
A lot of "bribes" in Africa are simply to expedite things. And in a lot of cases, they unfortunately need expiditing because the officials want money and delay it unnecessarily. Still, its quite a fair bit different to giving someone money to allow your AK47 shipment to go past customs.
Interestingly US law makes a distinction as well. You can’t bribe officials of foreigner governments, but paying money to speed up otherwise normal work said official would do is legal (to the US govt).
the US has (or used to have) this when it comes to processing certain forms/visa applications (I129, I140). it’s called premium processing. Is this corruption?
No because it is official policy with the money going to the organization. Having it go into the pocket of the person sets up perverse incentives that depend on the person.
If you get a receipt back for the "fee," it's not corrupting the process.
The style of writing indicates to me at least that OP was not writing to be technically precise to this level. Since it is abundantly clear to you that the payment was a bribe then isn’t the natural conclusion that it was a bribe and that “fee” was used to convey the idea that there was a cost involved that couldn’t be avoided?
I've seen similar things all over poorer regions of Central and South America as well. My take on this: I'm paying a portion of the salary of the immigration official, police officer, etc. For better or worse, that's often how they feed their families.
Doing the "right thing" is also hard. Paying a fine instead of a bribe could mean waiting 10 days for your license to be returned.
Our traffic laws are also very inconsistent here so it's very easy to make mistakes abroad:
Like Honduras requires two traffic triangles, but others only one. Nicaragua prohibits changing lanes in roundabouts, but it is allowed elsewhere. El Salvador enforces speed where there are no speed limit signs while Guatemala enforces them where there are many signs. And so on.
What you're describing is "corruption" and no, it does not have any positive benefit. It's the system that develops in the vacuum from a well working state, because when there is a general low level of trust, the quite human way to resolve that is to build "networks of trust" within society and that's not a good thing, because if you don't have a societal contract on how everyone should behave, the society won't be very nice to live in.
This also has nothing to do with Islam, you'll see it in most of the developing world and of course even in developed countries, but normally more contained.
I guess the extreme of this would be a country like Russia that more or less runs on bribes and favors, while at the same time having most actors accepting that nothing can be done about it.
The reason that this is classified as an Islamic cultural aspect in my mind is the clear differentiation between coexisting societies where I grew up.
The more "eastern" societal clusters have this kind of mentality more prevalent, while the most "western" ones not so much, while both are next to each other and equally poor.
The fact that other cultures share these aspects does not invalidate their presence in Islamic countries in my point of view, and of course I cannot prove that this is the case, the same way that no one can prove that it is not either. Of course I could be wrong
I think that corruption and economical development being inversely correlated is pretty widely accepted, but of course it doesn't have to be linear and exactly the same in different countries. In general though, the more well off the country is, the less need there is for corruption.
There are groups tracking this and I don’t think your statement is correct as corruption does vary, based on culture, from country to country.
The Corruptions Perception Index [0] is one that’s been around for a while and it shows differences between country. It’s not just GDP/PPP and there are many factors that affect it.
But also, haggling for example. It is something incredibly common in probably most Islamic cultures, markets/shops without prices are common place.
I think the unwillingness to set a fixed price that can be judged fair or not by either parties, and the need for a back and forth or a ripoff is a related part of the mentality
I'm not sure what your point is. If you ask yourself what corruption is; it's not a force of nature appearing from nowhere, it's a social response in a population to uncertainty, unmet needs and danger. So a country with a history of conflict, for example, would be expected to develop some level of corruption as the fabric of society breaks down.
The way you're phrasing it, it almost sounds like you're insinuating that some countries simply "are" less corrupt, and this is why they are more developed, which is perhaps a comforting thought if you happen to live in a highly developed country, but it's quite obviously not true which a simple historical review of a few centuries back can normally show.
I think they mean that reducing corruption is one of the factors that leads to economic development.
Some countries are less corrupt and this leads to more development, investment, etc.
It’s a low cost investment as the amount of corruption is very low, but the friction has much greater impact negatively than the cash generated.
I wish I could find the paper, but economically it’s better off to give the inspectors raises above the amount from bribes as that will improve development from the things that now happen that were being blocked by bribes.
> economically it’s better off to give the inspectors raises above the amount from bribes
I can't speak to whether this is verified or not, but at least it makes sense. The same logic is often used to motivate why politicians have relatively high wages, as decreasing them would incentivize bribes. It's of course not black and white and well-off politicians may still accept bribes, but at least I have a hard time seeing how the wage wouldn't be a factor.
I heard a similar anecdote about badly paid police officers, how many countries have this issue where police are paid so little they pretty much have to take bribes, in a perverted sense like waiting jobs in the US "include" tips, so the notion of an uncorrupted police officer is completely foreign as you simply wouldn't be able to make ends meet.
To be fair, he said "This is one of the aspects of the Islamic world that I do not like." That does not imply that the practice is limited to Islamic countries, but it does imply that it is common in all Islamic countries. That said, I don't see any reason to believe the practice is a direct result of those countries being Islamic.
Things seem to have got a bit better in Egypt. I've been here 3 months and yet to be asked for a bribe in spite of dealing with many roadblocks and a visa extension. Also the unpleasantness of having to haggle with taxis has been removed in Cairo by them having Uber. Quite a contrast with Luxor where there is no Uber and you have to deal with ten taxi guys shouting at you when you get off a bus.
I've traveled backpacker-style and off the track etc in quite a few countries, many of them really poor.
Egypt has by far been the worst place to visit when it comes to the locals. >50% of all money transactions (eg booking a tour, or buying water in a small shop, ...) the seller tried to scam me, whether it was ridiculous overcharge, bait and switch, not the right change, ....
Worst was the idiots around tourist attractions, like camel riders close to the pyramids in Cairo, but a security guard with AK-47 at the airport wasn't pleasant either. He said plainly he wanted baksheesh or our baggage would be overweight.
We got the tip to buy an arabic newspaper and carry it with me visible but not in a pointing-it-out manner. The idea is that people see it and think I know the ways. Worked, a bit.
I understand where you're coming from, and I sympathize with your comment (indeed, I am suffering from it as well), however I disagree that it's an Islamic world issue. It's common in underdeveloped / developing countries, a large amount of which are Islamic countries.
As for why it happens or why it's common... there are plenty of reasons, really. (obviously, I will talk about my country only, and what I see) Personally, I believe that the most important one / the root cause is that the law isn't enforced, which erodes peoples' trust in it as well as people's respect, and you end up with people exploiting that (a vicious cycle, as you said). Not only that, but when the law is finally enforced, it's usually not enforced fairly[1].
If anyone is curious about Islam's stance, well, Islam explicitly says:
Translation: "And do not consume one another's wealth unjustly or send it [in bribery] to the rulers in order that [they might aid] you [to] consume a portion of the wealth of the people in sin, while you know [it is unlawful]."
روى الإمام أحمد عن ثوبان قال رسول الله: لَعَنَ اللّهُ الراشيَ والمُرتَشِيَ والرائشَ الذي يَمشِي بَينَهُما..
Translation: The Prophet (S) said, 'Allah's curse is on the briber, the bribed, and the agent between them.’
And there are more.
I do not blame you (nor anyone else) for the correlation, I just wanted to clarify.
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[1] This is off-topic, but there was a huge issue in Egypt with regards to people building apartment complexes and buildings illegally, through bribing the province officials. Well, recently,the government said that enough is enough and went to crack down on that. They placed huge fines on the illegal buildings (supposed to be paid by the builder in question / building owner, but he/she actually have no incentive to, so the people who paid were actually the building residents), and said that if the fines aren't paid, the buildings will be bulldozed (and indeed, some were).
They punished the people who bought residence in the illegal buildings (some of whom actually didn't know that it was illegal). But the governmental workers / officials who gave out the fake permits and took the bribes? Not a single one was punished.
I don't see how it's comparatively well-hidden, let alone harder to fight as a result. There seems to be just as much hidden corruption at the upper levels in less wealthy and non-western countries, except that there's also more lower-level and visible corruption in those countries.
A police officer in rural Colombia can be negotiated with to obtain an outcome that is satisfactory to all parties. Try that at the San Fransisco DMV, even if they want to help you they can't because the process is the process.
There are pros and cons to both systems. The low bribery systems tend to curb the worst behavior (no amount of donating to the right causes will help you put a toxic waste processing plant in Manhatten) at the expense of really screwing the people who are edge cases.
The equatorial developing nations tend to have a lot of class divide and racism problems that get nastier in a regulatory environment where everything is fuzzy. If you want to see a bribery based regulatory environment done right look at eastern Europe from 1980-2000ish (years vary depending on where you look).
HN loves the "hurr durr stupid poor countries and their bribery" trope but for those countries routine bribery is mostly just a cultural workaround for the fact that they can't afford a massive administrative state to grant you a stupid variance from their stupid zoning rules on your stupid garden shed (or whatever). They're effectively pushing decision making onto the leaves of the organizational tree and cutting the organizational tree out of the payment loop somewhat. Yes, it goes awry sometimes but it's not like western bureaucracies have any lack of similarly bad outcomes.
I don't know about you but I don't want my police officers to be "negotiated with". I want them to enforce the law fairly and evenly, and not waive laws for their personal gain.
That works fine on paper and in internet comments but in reality the law is often asinine and/or intentionally broad to facilitate easy enforcement and enforcement is almost always subject to the discretion of those doing the enforcement. Their discretion is anything but fair and even.
By saying you want the goalposts located at the "fairly and evenly line" you're just moving the inequality from being the fault of the enforcers to be the fault of other parts of the system. The poor guy can't take time off work to fight the ticket and the end result of the system is barely any fairer.
If you're being reasonable it's much easier to say "officer, I'm being reasonable, here's some money, screw off" than it is to try and appeal to a bureaucracy, especially if you're doing something that's outside the letter of the law but within the spirit of the law.
For most people most of the time the difference is a wash. The main difference is the edge cases and failure modes. Think about this next time you're (you reading this comment with disdain, not the person I'm replying to in particular) waiting for a police officer to finish writing you your ticket for going the same speed as everyone else while looking slightly more interesting than everyone else.
I have always been curious about this, because in my mind systems (however distasteful we may find them) do not arise for no reason. You imagine it reflects some underlying dynamics going on.
I have heard that Arabic / Islamic society is much more family, neighbor, who-you-know oriented versus western society trusting more the rules of some authority, even if not personally known to you. Even for example, mundane things like if you need your plumbing fixed, you don't look up the yellow pages, you ask your friend to refer someone.
Does this lead to "favors" being more acceptable, like as a gift to someone you know for having helped you? Interpreted in a more charitable way, bribes/baksheesh are an expression of gratitude (though now an obligation of doing business)?
You start to think such factors must be ingrained in a people's mentality, because otherwise, why don't we just declare laws that make this sort of practice illegal and everyone is happier?
Some economists / sociologists classify this as low-trust/high-trust societies. In low-trust societies, trust typically does not extend far beyond family and personal connections. There's nothing Islamic about it: low-trust is more or less synonymous with low- to middle income societies, with the majority non-Islamic (China, India, Latin America).
High-trust is largly "Western" (North America, Western/Norhern Europe, Oceania), but also the rich Asian countries (Japan, South Korean, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore). The causal relationship between high-trust and high-income is difficult to disentangle, but there's plausibly some form of positive feedback loop at work.
I'm not sure what you have in mind with "arise for no reason". Both historically and presently by population-majority, low-trust society seem the norm and high-trust the exeption.
> The causal relationship between high-trust and high-income is difficult to disentangle, but there's plausibly some form of positive feedback loop at work.
I've read that the rule of law has something to do with it. E.g.: "Where civil liberties and property rights are secure under a strong rule of law, fewer social resources are up for political grabs and groups have less opportunity to benefit via zero-sum or negative-sum competition against other groups."
While I mostly agree, I thought Japan is meant to be notorious for corruption? A very different type, of course: not handing in used notes to a tax official, but rather high-level, white-glove type thing. Like, making sure the state turns a blind eye to safety failings at a nuclear plant.
Maybe there is another dimension than low/high trust?
The low/high trust distinction for many writers (e.g., Fukuyama in Trust) isn't primarily about trust in government to be uncorrupt (or even societal trust in government more generally), but rather about a shared consensus about social rules that facilitates reliable, predictable interpersonal cooperation. e.g., A person can trust that if they enter into an agreement with someone else, there's a likelihood that person will perform without a third party outside of the agreement interposing themselves and insisting on a bribe, and if they don't perform, there's a set of neutral rules (e.g., the courts) to resolve the dispute that again don't require exogenous pressures like bribes or influence from powerful family members. Basically less uncertainty, that in turn creates less unnecessary economic friction. Japan satisfies this definition of a high trust society. Trusting that the government can't be bribed is an aspect of the high/low trust concept, but it's not really the core.
There's an interesting treatise, "L'invention de l'homme moderne" by Robert Muchembled, where he details how medieval Europe transitioned from a decentralized and low-trust environment to a centralized and high-trust environment with independent arbiters like police and the courts. For most people, in most regions and most points in time, the idea that a central authority would decide what is right, what you can and cannot charge, how you can and cannot deal with those who harm you, etc., would be completely alien. Central authorities waged wars and asked for taxes and that was pretty much it.
> This is one of the aspects of the Islamic world that I do not like. Bartering/bribing/coercing is super common, and I fail to see how it could have any positive benefit at all.
Sorry but that just sounds massively Islamophobic. I'm half Croatian, we have had a history of more-or-less open corruption in all levels of government, from policemen to heads of state, and the same applies for wide swaths of Eastern Europe. Not to mention the entire narcorruption situation in Southern America.
Corruption is a symptom of weak government structures (and, to some extent, poverty) which force people to fend for themselves on all levels to survive, not something that is inherently tied to any religion or ethnicity.
GP didn't say that corruption was limited to the Islamic world, just that it's one aspect of the Islamic world that he doesn't like. Of course corruption is widespread around the world.
I think you mean "non-first-world" countries as it's relatively common in all poor countries (or countries that are "rich" but have huge poor populations with only the 0.1% having all the wealth) not just islamic countries.
This has nothing to do with the Islamic world and everything to do with poverty and income disparity. The fact that you associate this with Islam is repugnant. The West is equally corrupt - you just don't gain a moral kick from recognizing the equivalence.
> The fact that you associate this with Islam is repugnant.
I think that your comment would've been a lot stronger without the jab. Every time you call someone repugnant for having a particular bias (which we all do), you increase distance and decrease understanding.
Expressions of religious bigotry are not conducive to HN's guidelines.
Bigotry on the basis of religious grounds is repugnant wherever you see it, and should be called out wherever you see it, because it always results in atrocities. Casual bigotry like this only grows into collective hatred through complicity.
It seems much more appropriate to write "Islam doesn't teach people to be corrupt. Corruption is a function of poverty, not religion. For example countries of religion X aren't islamic but report similar signs of corruption." Calling people bigots seems less appropriate and counter productive.
Someone who makes even a rude assumption about a people isn't necessarily a bigot. They could just be wrong and you could correct them without insulting them in the same you would hope people would correct you if you said something inaccurate.
I think its very clear that the auto-hatred of Islam is driven by bigotry and fear. Anyone who does even a cursory examination of the subject can see it does not, in fact, promote corruption.
You might be pantywaiste about calling out bigotry online, but I'm not.
This might be the kind of life for some but not for me. I cannot handle the bribery and unspoken rules and such. It's a fascinating diary entry but it also makes me feel so anxious just reading it.
I cherish being able to have my guard down at almost all times.
If youre a (seemingly) rich foreigner in a poor country, what do you expect?
Per capita GDP in Egypt is $250/month. For a guy on a yacht $5 or $10 dollars is no difference. For the other side, its a substantial percent of their earnings. They understand the differential, which is why they will press for more.
This “dance” where they pretend to be your friends when trying to extract that money and cigarettes from you when you are trying to get a service is extremely annoying. Want cigarettes? Put cigarettes on the requirements list.
Not to mention that the informality creates special class of corrupt officials that easily leads to mafia politics. Criminals develop relationships with these people and easily do stuff that they are not supposed to do and the law abiding people stress over the bribes and mood of the staff.
This even goes higher up, as paves the way for higher levels of corruption where things needs to be at scale and yet hush hush, exposing whole nations to political risks(from money laundering to terrorism).
I think you mean you stress over the bribes. There are many people who are accustomed to handling such minor corruption and yet are not corrupt themselves. They know how to handle it with minimum anxiety or disruption to their lives. Obviously it would be preferred it the corruption wouldn't exist, but I think you are also projecting your anxiety on others.
Secondly, the likely reason they can't charge more is that these prices are likely set by some person or system higher up than them, yet they are taking more on top of that official price. Thus, if the price were raised, it wouldn't be going to those who are doing the graft. Your premise of "just charge higher prices" misunderstands the nature of the prices and the market. Again, I'm not saying I like corrupt systems. I very much dislike them and think they are one of the primary causes preventing many developing countries from as quickly catching up to developed countries. But to fix them, we need to understand them, and saying "just internalize the bribery cost into the official price" misses the reason it exists in the first place.
"The port authority should raise prices without changing pay or (dis)incentive structures for low level officials" seems like a straw-man, and I don't think that's what OP meant.
You can pay the pilots and low-level officials more money and implement "There are lots of other people who want your cushy job -- you will be summarily fired if you are caught soliciting bribes" policies as well as surveillance and reporting systems to enforce them.
This requires political will from the people at the top, and often results in anger from the people at the bottom, so it doesn't usually happen until the bribery problem is out of control.
Argentina is a good example. Maritime cargo hold inspectors famously made a habit of soliciting larger and larger bribes. They became an outlier, and eventually the shipping companies started to notice, and they put pressure on Argentina to clean up:
Totally agree with you that raising the price won’t solve the problem.
I do have to disagree with you on one point: that there are people who are not corrput themselves who function well within the system. Corruption begins with good intentions. Crime begins with bad intentions. Every single act makes the complicit lose the corrupt because what a non-corrupt person would do is fight it.
Are the complicit less bad? Would they rather have it another way? Yes. Yes. Still, they are corroding every time they choose not to fight (even if it comes at great personal cost)
I don't think you can be paying bribes while claiming not to be corrupt yourself. By participating in corruption you are enabling it. In some places there might be no way around that but that's why I don't go to those places.
I think once I heard something like "In the west you pay bribes so that the officials don't do their job, in the middle east you pay bribes so that they do their jobs".
I'm familiar with high-bribe environments and used to go through bribery intensive border between Bulgaria-Turkey.
It's a breeze for the regulars, they know why their document is not processed or why the bus is being kept and know the channel, and the expected bribes so they easily pay and go through.
The problem is, when you are not a regular you simply get frustrated because you can't just ask how much since there are anti-corruption measure in place that need to be avoided. You need o go somewhere or give it to someone seemingly unrelated.
It can be somewhat parallel to tipping culture but in tipping they do their job an expect a gratitude payment, which doesn't slow down or block the process. The bribery culture has it's own dark side since you need to be coerced into doing it.
Also, the Turkey-Bulgaria border often gets busted for running large scale duty free alcohol and cigarettes contraband. That's when they get bribed for not doing their job(of preventing contraband), the "pay to get things done" bribery mostly died off because of the digitalisation. Don't search my car, don't inspect my bus in exchange of cigarettes bribery still lives though.
You misunderstand the system. The charge goes to the organisation.
Then the individual guards and officials then make their own fortune using the position they were given. Think of them more as entrepreneurs or self-employed.
This system of handing out unpaid or poorly paid government positions has existed throughout the world, britain in 1800 worked like this - judges were not paid, they charged defendants whatever price they wanted.
In Tsarist Russia the local officials working for the state" were charging the locals for their services whatever they felt like charging them. That way the state did not have to deal with paying them salaries, it was up to officials to 'make themselves usefull to thw community'
What we call corruption today is just how the world used to work before - it was not structured and not everything had a fixed price.
I know that tax to the government and cigarettes to the officer are different but I think in 2021 no one should deal with that, we no longer do a lot of things that were normal in the olden days.
And those who feel to operate like that should maybe should be more open about the payments so we can skip the negotiation part. A carton of cigarettes is not a big deal but trying deal with the official that tries to coerce you into that payment is. It makes things slow and unpredictable.
Oh and I strongly disagree with the "entrepreneur" analogy, the people who get into these lucrative positions are people close to the politically dominant class. They often "donate" some of that money to their church/mosque/party and take it easy on the people of their clan when making life hard to the outsiders.
A recent case is the case of Reza Zarrab, the guy who laundered Iranian money through Turkey and get caught. He has become a billionaire and was very well connected to the Turkish political class. Erdogan himself pulled a lot of strings with Trump. Very high profile case with a lot of US and Turkish public figures being involved, you should Google it.(Spoiler: Rudolph Giuliani was on his defence team)
Apparently he had an issue with a customs officer called Teoman who refused bribes so he got Teoman fired. Those informal organisations are more like cabals than corporations. It's not about entrepreneurship but loyalty to the higher ups. It does create a business but that business is reserved to the people in power and the bribe takers are simply employees.
Zarrab also gave a master class in bribery. His motto was "You pay prostitutes afterwards but public officials beforehand", apparently. Good to know.
> Then they should simply charge the higher amount.
Then, to make things go smoothly, you will have to pay the higher amount as well as a bribe.
> This even goes higher up, as paves the way for higher levels of corruption where things needs to be at scale and yet hush hush, exposing whole nations to political risks(from money laundering to terrorism).
I think you have it the opposite way around. Where there is an effective government that makes sure that laws are written and enforced fairly, and wealth is distributed somewhat evenly, corruption disappears.
In my 50 years I've never encountered bribery in the USA, and I've lived all over the country. Yet, as you point out, the USA has greater wealth inequality than Egypt. So, apparently it is not wealth inequality that leads to corruption like bribery. I honestly don't know why Egypt has bribery but the USA doesn't. Maybe it is just cultural? A lot of the USA culture is derived from Europe and especially the UK. How prevalent is bribery in Western Europe?
To me US 'tipping culture' is very much the same in experience as bribes like these in non-western countries.
I think that basing the definition in bribe on what feels uncomfortable to us personally not a good way to define it. I'm from the Netherlands, and I have heard it said that Dutch corruption exists as much as anywhere, the bribes are just always 0 euro, to ease our consciences. I wish I had a reference or two, but maybe these things are understudied.
>To me US 'tipping culture' is very much the same in experience as bribes like these in non-western countries.
Uh, no. Not in any sense at all are the two similar. I can't even begin to imagine how you come up with that analogy.
When was the last time you tipped a government official? When was the last time you knew that unless you tipped a government official you wouldn't get your task done, even though your documents were in order?
Tipping in the US is overwhelmingly to directly customer-facing staff in private companies, and it is done after the transaction has been completed.
Bribery/facilitation payment is always done before the fact, and is almost uniformly done with governmental (or quasi-governmental) officials.
You must not be familiar with tipping. Tipping always happens to people with no power. Bribery happens to people with power. Nothing bad will happen to me if I never tip (other than perhaps bad karma and some dirty looks). Very bad things can happen to me if I done give bribes. Tipping happens after the service and payment are completed. Bribing happens beforehand. The two are so entirely different on almost every level (especially the power dynamics).
That's fine but my post isn't about personal experience; it's a list of ways in which the two things are different in a concrete, practical sense based on their common meanings.
Could you expand why you think they are similar rather than just suggesting that the matter is subjective?
In the course of going about ones business, ill-specified amounts need to be paid extra if expedient service is to be expected. This is the local custom.
But you don’t have to tip. Other than maybe dirty looks absolutely nothing will happen if you don’t tip. The ones being tipped are totally powerless. They are society’s poor. It is closer to a voluntary socialist tax to help the poor than any kind of bribery to officials in a place of power.
I've always viewed tips as a way to let customers decide the merit pay for employees. Does NL have the uber star rating tied to tips? It was a way to make the star rating meaningful. It used to be everyone gave five unless it was terrible service, so uber made you put money where your rating was.
Edit: I remember the public transit being quite good so maybe NL doesn't have uber? I also remember waiters not being very easy to find to ask for anything.
There's Uber, but indeed, I am satisfied with public transport and have never used the likes of Uber.
It's not that I never tip at a restaurant (however, seldomly in NL), it's just that in the US you'll get bills with a percentage already 'included', and it 'is understood' that you must tip _something_, in a way (to me) very similar to bribes elsewhere.
Percentage included only happens for large parties (8 or more). Normally you don’t have to tip. It is entirely voluntary (though strongly encouraged since it is helping the poorest members of society). Think of it like a voluntary socialist tax to help the poor.
I've bribed people twice in the US. Once, when a family member desperately needed to use the bathroom and a gas station attendant was insisting theirs was for employees only. I gave him twenty bucks and he let us use it. Another time to get a table setup for our group at a bar where they said they couldn't seat us was very similar - "Could you seat us if I gave you 60 bucks?" Turns out they could in that case.
Granted, I hope these wouldn't qualify as any kind of criminal wrongdoing, and are pretty minor, but there is at least some bribery happening here!
One time I was an airport, and I didnt know that curbside baggage handler staff expected tips.
There was no sign indicating that. And they wear airport staff uniforms.
After checking in. I was asked for a tip but I wasn't able to give one because I had no change in cash. I was given a very angry look but I really had no idea about the tip.
When I arrived to my destination my suitcase's wheels were damaged.
A country where everyone is equally poor is going to have more corruption than a country with high inequality between the middle class people and the billionaire oligarchs.
I'm not saying everyone in Egypt is living in poverty, while no one in the US is. But the poverty rate in Egypt is something like 30%, vs 10% in the USA.
Having said that, the US has tipping, so there's that.
It’s worth noting that bribery comes in many forms, and not all cultures consider it a moral failing even where it is nominally illegal. “Facilitation payments” exist in the grey area between bribes-that-are-illegal and bribes-that-are-business-as-usual.
The people getting fleeced are not from Egypt. You have to look at the wealth inequality between the customs officials and the passengers, not the income difference between the customs officials and their bosses.
I don't think they would charge the same amount from everyone. I'm sure that their bribe varies depending on their customer and how much they can pay. If they deem someone to be more valuable, it would be unlikely for them to settle down for less. And I don't think they would be able to write down their criteria for bribe in an actual legal document and make it public.
That's correct. Instead of offering classes of services ("basic", "premium", etc.) to allow customers of different price sensitivities to self-select, they work with you (in a sense) to figure out your price sensitivity and charge dynamically based on that.
This makes sense because it would be very complicated to try to formalise and market the classes of service, compared to just hashing it out as people with unique relationships to each other.
As much as I love living in one of the least corrupt places in the world, I have to admit that drawing up formal contracts for interpersonal relationships is sort of the weird way to do things. I like it and I think it has many benefits, but when I try to look at it from 10,000 feet it does seem odd from a human perspective.
You're 100% spot on that this type of environment breeds criminality and corruption. It is undesirable.
But it is unfortunately the way of life in a lot of under-developed countries (nothing to do with Islamic countries as another comment pointed out elsewhere). Feeling uncomfortable around this behaviour is also a very typical Western outlook on this. Having grown up in the middle east, bartering and the "give and take" is just going with the flow. Its endemic.
> for some but not for me [...] makes me feel so anxious
> what do you expect
I think it's less about expectations and more about preferences.
Sure, this might be how it works in that part of the world, but if you're not from there, and you're not accustomed to constantly looking over your shoulder, an experience like this can be harrowing.
Even if you know your counterpart is just doing what they always do and not giving it a second thought, some people would be drowning in anxiety. This seems like a completely reasonable personal limit to me.
If youre a (seemingly) rich foreigner in a poor country, what do you expect?
Since you asked, I'd expect that professionals would do their job, not require me to bribe them to do their jobs. Which is why I wouldn't feel comfortable making this kind of trip.
The corruption goes up the ladder. These folks to keep there jobs likely have to pay in cash and cigarettes to whoever controls there ability to work the canal.
> For the other side, its a substantial percent of their earnings
The article infers that the measurer "measures" around half a dozen yachts a day, so they'd be collecting somewhere around $1,200 a month in bribes (which coincidentally is the same amount as the US minimum wage).
That's not a substantial percent of their earnings, it's their primary income. Their government salary is just lunch money.
I live in a wealthy western country and work for a living. I would rather not work so hard. Sometimes, in my line of work I encounter very wealthy people. Billionaires. People whose spare change could change my life. People who drive cars more expensive than my home, and have a fleet of them.
You know what I don't do? Try to harass, intimidate or rob them. Do you know why? Because I am not an animal.
The fact that this is expected in Egypt does not speak well of their culture. This person lives in a poor country, yes, but I don't think it is likely he is starving.
Some countries and cultures are just more corrupt. Some rich, some poor.
"You know what I don't do? Try to harass, intimidate or rob them. Do you know why? Because I am not an animal."
I think you should gey off your high horse, comparing people to animals is not cool.
For starters, you misunderstand the basics - are you actually sure you could harras a person with billions of dollars, connections and lawyers?
Because, doing that in Russia is a good strategy to end in beried in the forest.
In Brutain in 1800 judges were not paid by the state, the people being judged paid them. And the more they paid, the 'better' they were judged. That was official policy. Now obviously we call that corruption.
>In Brutain in 1800 judges were not paid by the state, the people being judged paid them. And the more they paid, the 'better' they were judged. That was official policy. Now obviously we call that corruption.
Assuming you mean Britain, this is false. Judges in Britain have been paid by the state since the 13th century, and their oath to "in no way accept gift or reward from any party in litigation before them" dates to 1346.
I think there's a lot of variation depending on the culture and context (i.e. this is a single impersonal transaction with an almost zero chance of repeat business, and probably attracts a lot of sketchy people to begin with). Many places in the world are poor but you don't feel live everyone is constantly trying to take advantage of you (but of course, the opposite is also true).
He didn't say what he expected, he said he didn't like it. They are welcome to charge whatever they want for services, it would be nice if that was just a normal up front conversation though.
This is a ridiculous statement. I would venture to guess that you have smoked weed in a place where it was still illegal. But breaking that law is not equivalent to rape. That's a total false equivalence. Not all laws are equally just from each person's perspective. Minor corruption like this, while corrosive, is not viewed as negatively by the local population.
I would argue that the US allowing infinite money on politics and our forms of lobbying, regulatory capture, and rent seeking are way worse than this minor corruption.
Both rape and scamming have a perpetrator and a victim - who is the victim of smoking weed? This is less about the law, and more about the morality of victimising someone; legal harassment/threats would also fall into this category.
It’s stressful but it serves a purpose. In the west, we use “sliding scales”, or “surge pricing”, or “suggested donations” to charge people different prices according to their means. The rest of the world has very similar mechanisms. The main difference is the sliding scales aren’t published, even if they are well known.
It's a hilarious (nefarious?) kind of xenophobia that's repulsed by this kind of stuff but is wilfully ignorant of exactly the same thing, by another name, in the developed world. And I'm not even talking about "sliding scales" but the well known grift and corruption. The truth is this kind of exploit exists everywhere institutions exist because individuals are not identical with institutions.
Paul Lutus (the guy who wrote AppleWriter) sailed around the world in the late 80's, solo. He wrote about it in "Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor", which is freely available online at his own personal website:
Paul is a fairly prolific commenter on Reddit. Over the years there have been a few hilarious exchanges between him and some unfortunate know-it-alls on the platform.
None beyond the ama/username link That spare_account provided. It’s been 4-5 years at least, most of the stuff i read was about his work on the shuttle, people arguing with him about various engineering topics.
Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle[0] is also a great travel read. His style is much more scientific. But that eye for rationalism often leads to very good observations about the places he visited
Dana's Two Years Before the Mast[1] is another good voyage book. Dana is a recent Harvard grad that makes his way out round Cape Horn to California in last days of the Ranchero era. Any SV people will recognize the place names, but not the places, so to speak. His young, but refined, voice is very special on a long distance fur trading ship.
My dad is from Ismailia, a town on the Suez Canal (right in the middle of it). Growing up, about 20 years ago, we could go on a fishing boat or speed boat into the canal, and sometimes even get somewhat close to the ships. It was awesome.
How do people in countries where bribes are pervasive think about Anglosphere countries where they aren't? Do they think we're oblivious to the potential? Not interested in money? So rich it doesn't matter? Or do they feel sorry for officials not getting the share they deserve?
I can put one datapoint: a person i know closely forgot a bag on a train in Switzerland, with significant valuables inside. This was in a rural area, with a tiny train station.
He told the local staff, they told the train driver, and at his next stop he passed it to the driver of a train going the other way. The guy had his valuables back withing 40 minutes.
He tried to offer some cash to the guy as a token of gratitude and he got offended. The dude was left feeling very uncomfortable and not sure what to do or how to soove over the situation.
That guy is reasonably aware of how europe works, but old habbit die hard. Also switzerland is probably one of the most orderly places around
As an Egyptian, my thought is that it's a conscience issue, and also a law-trust issue. People in Anglosphere countries respect the law better than here (and the law is also actually applied and enforced), while here people just don't care (and the law isn't applied in many cases). Some people actually boast that they're breaking the law :)
I had conversations about this topic with people from Russia, Turkey, and Iran. They compared their country of origin with Switzerland and Germany. It was not only about bribery but also about informal vs. formal organization of society.
They all told me that the clear organizational structures and reliability in the West are a big relief for them personally. They loved this aspect of the western country.
And I remember the stressed faces of the local victims when they were stopped by the highwaymen (the traffic police) in Azerbaijan.
So I believe everyone hates the corruption and would love to live in a place where you can rely on the official rules.
What stood out the most in this story for me, it’s how pack of cigarettes seem to operate as some kind of currency.
They are not particularly expensive (about 85 EGP or 6 USD a pack) so I wonder why they seem to prefer them over money.
Are they just being hypocritical and thinking that just because they are asking for a pack of cigarettes (instead of money) they are not engaging in bribery?
I would assume that they either have direct value (bank notes cannot be smoked), or they're a more reliable store of value than bank notes, or they're more liquid than bank notes in the types of business they would need money for later.
In short, maybe cigarettes are a better money than whatever fiat bank notes could replace them.
(Though the text does seem to indicate that payment was often made in a combination of fiat and cigarettes, so maybe they're about equal in value after all.)
They were also a currency in American federal prisons, until the prison system banned smoking. At that point, they were replaced with pouches of mackerel...
This is a common thing here in India, be it a traffic police man or govt employee in office . Not cigarettes but currency is valid, you are expected to pay based on benefit you get. You get ₹1000, you have to pay around 10%.
While it is annoying to pay, even more annoying thing is the entitlement of authorities. People here are so used to the informal tax they wouldn’t bother resisting in anyway.
These practices are called "Facilitating Payments" [0] (as opposed to bribery) and they're explicitly allowed by laws like the FCPA [1]. It seems strange for them to be legal, but the distinction is that you're merely expediting the work of a bureaucratic official that was going to do the work anyway, if perhaps more slowly. When you start paying decision-makers to make high-value decisions in your favor, that becomes bribery and it gets illegal very fast. (Although there can be a lot of gray area involved.)
The fact that these practices are technically legal doesn't make them less odious, IMO.
I worked for a very large bank for a spell and distinctly remember this from their mandatory anti-bribery training. I thought it was hilarious that this was enshrined in the formal material, but was glad because i would stress putting it on my expense report.
That has me thinking. A non-euphemistic facilitative payment would be like priority mail essentially of paying more to the root institute for a higher tier of service.
Reminds me of the ironic case of university admission legality - bribing the institution itself with say donations large enough to get your name on a building wing gets your lazy idiot kid into a prestigious university but doing so directly is bribery. The funny thing is that it is so transparently selfish yet it actually makes sense from an incentives letter. If the dillution from lazy idiot rich kid's admission allows for funding to do more positive things to improve quality overall if spent wisely. Doing directly just lines their pocket.
Now government vs private university is apples to oranges but it hints at a source of harm from corruption other than just unfairness is skewing decision making towards personal benefits instead of who they should be operating on behalf of.
I couldn't help but think of Bitcoin network fees when I read your sentence: "you're merely expediting the work of a [miner] that was going to do the work anyway".
Wow that was tough to read. The writer seems incredibly calm given the experience -- I'd never be able to cope with that crap without punching someone. Kudos
> I knew I could be in for at least a day or two of delays, more Yacht Club Fees, etc. so I agreed to pay it. It was "only" $75 too much.
Reminds me of a pretty sad episode I had in Mexico. After hearing about it from friends a few times, the time finally came for me (and my wife) to meet a corrupt police officer on our way to the airport.
Long story short... I ended up paying $100 to have him let us go. I then regretted it, but... What could you do in these situations? Is it worth the trouble? Can a proper behavior (refusing to bribe) change things?
same thing happened to my family many years ago. I don't think there's any way around it. there's a reason why they set up on the road to the airport. they know it's easily worth $100 to americans not to miss their flight.
USD 225 plus some small amount of bribes for a transit according to the article. Contrast that with the recent news reporting that called an amount of roughly 250000 EUR per ship on average. From another source 4.2 billion Euros income per year for 19000 ships per year which roughly matches the quarter million per ship number.
Unfortunately the article isn't dated but from the navigation bar I assume the transit was before 2003. Does anyone know what a transit in a small yacht costs today, or know even the formula the article talks about?
All of the buoys are fitted with radar reflectors. Since all vessels transiting the canal have to have pilots, I wouldn't think visibility would be that big of a deal when they can see the buoys with radar.
They do have radar, AIS, and an electronic chart on which their position and the position of the buoys is plotted, as well as the other ships (via AIS). And a pilot on board who is very familiar with the area. All of that helps a lot, and in some ways it's probably better than driving a car in that fog. But yes, it's still terrifying.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. Something strange I noticed, it seems they are not meeting any other ships going the other way? Is there separate locations where boats are waiting before they continue?
Second note is that it's easy to notice how windy it is and how easy it would be to get stuck in the side if you're not paying 100% attention. At many points in the video you can see the ship it's filmed from pointing in one way, but actually travel a different way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a3hLZJZmlI is another time lapse, with a bit more explanation of what's happening. Around 3:21 they're on the Great Bitter Lake, where the northbound convoy passes the southbound convoy.
The problem is that corruption is contagious. When you assent to it, you are compromised as well. It's a kind of collateral blackmail people use. You can see it in politics and even corporate management in the west, it's just a little more nuanced and refined. While I think bribe culture is disgusting, and it's infuriating in Canada to see how dirty money effects neighbourhoods and how every level of government is in on it, the way corruption works in companies is when your boss tells you, "I want to be honest about this statement," it can often mean he wants you to hold the risk even if it means lying.
In tech, there is a certain kind of project manager who will try to extract date commitments from engineers by browbeating them like a prosecutor looking for leverage, and the reason is they want to get you submit and "lie," so they can make a fake commitment to their boss and blame you for it. It's the result of a similar kind of corruption in the organization. Corruption itself isn't cultural, and the WASP version of it is a weirdly oblique gaslighting, but it certainly infects cultures, and it's anathema to what any culture would consider its ideal.
It's pretty impressive how quickly Poland turned into a mostly "high trust" society (I don't know about Romania). Like, a few decades? Sure there's still some corruption and nepotism but totally not like this, and it changed in a single generation.
The police there were Soviet-style horribly corrupt. And, some years ago, this changed from one day to the next. They fired all the old officers and started with better training and better payment for the new ones. And with punishment for bribery and criminal behavior at duty.
The society decided to do this and it worked very well. I personally experienced encounters with police in Georgia and they were nice and friendly. They helped me instead of robbing me. Very impressive.
we did a road trip for a few days in Romania a few years ago and experienced no corruption. It was a rental though perhaps it would be different if we had foreign plates?
I find it very interesting. Most of us are more used to highways and airports. The problems one usually has are "if you don't have the documents with you, you go home/get on the next flight".
But in "boat world", delaying a trip a few days is no big deal. So things move slowly, there's time for all this cigarette song and dance, etc. This story has some old world charm in some sense.
Of course bribery is not cool, but in other ways I'm glad the whole world isn't (wasn't.. 2003) so homogeneous, and would prefer it to remain that way because its more interesting.
They did have to hire a pilot and there were some handlers at some point, I think the port offered the services though so you just paid the port services.
Going in a small sailboat through doldrums, then against south passats, all the way to Canaries will take about two or three months of non-stop sailing. You will still need to enter ports to get food and fuel, and deal with african border and port authorities. The whole feat would be an equivalent of 5-10 Suez Canal transitions in terms of haggling and bribery, 10-20 in money and 30-50 times longer.
See, the problem is it's cheaper to pay all the bribes. Morality is good and commendable but in the end money speaks, at least in the shipping industry. The trip around it is way, way more expensive, both in time and fuel.
Chrome will just attempt https first when you type something in your browser without an explicit http:// prefix. If the https:// connection fails, it will fall back to http.
My home country has huge Islamic influences, and it is prevalent there as well. All it does is destroy your sense of trust for any authority, and without even minimal trust no one ever tries to improve things, a vicious cycle.