It’s clear Australians are increasingly wary of the power of big business; in the latest post-election survey by researchers at the Australian National University, 74% responded “yes” to the proposition that “big business has too much power”, with 56% (up from the last survey) agreeing that “government is run for a few big interests”.

Contributing to these perceptions is the fact that governments have seemed very reluctant to take action against wayward corporations (perhaps because it might slow the election donations from business to a trickle and vaporise the opportunities for post-political employment).

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In the face of frequent revelations about corporate wrongdoing and corruption – including participation in foreign bribery, accelerating levels of tax avoidance and evasion, fraudulent misrepresentation of financial products, systematic underpayment of wages, and environmental vandalism – governments, state and federal, have not responded with robust measures to deter such practices. Nor have they made good use of the powers they already have to take effective action, despite evidence of clear abuses of corporate power.

In its report on Australia’s responses to foreign bribery, for example, the OECD indicated it was “seriously concerned that Australia’s overall enforcement of the foreign bribery offence to date has been extremely low.” It said it was particularly worried about Australia’s failure to implement rules to debar contractors found to have engaged in corrupt behaviour from undertaking government funded services or procurement, a move that has been used successfully in Canada, the US and by the World Bank and, to a lesser extent, in the EU.

Similarly, Transparency International, which regularly assesses countries’ attempts to stamp out corruption, rates Australia’s efforts as only “moderate” and recommends that we “introduce clear rules that prevent a company from tendering for government contracts if it has committed foreign bribery offences and has not self-reported”.

My ears pricked up when I saw that CIMIC had again been awarded a major construction project by the WA government

While there are other tools available to governments, debarment for breach of integrity offences, including bribery of overseas officials, would be a strong addition to legislative regulation of corporate behaviour. As TI recommends, such offences should also result in corporations being “debarred from obtaining incentives, subsidies, grants or loans from government agencies”.

It highlights the Canadian government’s decision to debar contractors from participating in government procurements for 10 years after a contractor or its affiliate has been convicted of an “integrity offence”. Integrity offences encompass bribery of local and foreign public officials, extortion, tax evasion, bid-rigging, forgery, fraudulent manipulation of stock exchange transactions, insider trading, falsification of books, money laundering and acceptance of secret commissions.

Like many people, I’ve watched some of the more florid examples of corporate wrongdoing with alarm and noted how easy it seems to be for big corporations to shrug off even the most well-founded findings of fraud and corruption, suffering few real consequences.

My ears pricked up when I saw that CIMIC had again been awarded a major construction project by the WA government, this time for the construction of Roe 8, a project to which I have been opposed for over 25 years. I knew about CIMIC, formerly Leightons, because of a series of investigations by Fairfax Media and evidence given by a whistleblower before the Senate inquiry into foreign bribery alleging that Leighton International paid kickbacks and facilitation payments on several overseas projects and that a former Leighton executive signed off on an alleged $15m sham steel contract.

It was alleged that the offshore arm of Leighton Holdings “paid millions of dollars in bribes to middlemen as part of an audacious strategy to influence Iraq’s deputy prime minister, oil minister and other senior officials, and win more than $1.3bn of oilfield contracts”. Both the corporate regulator and the Australian federal police have pursued these allegations over the last several years, although there has been criticism of their apparent lack of alacrity and resolve in pursuing these inquiries. One of the players is now before the courts.

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Underscoring the legal and financial risks to the company (and to anybody who deals with them) of the continuing allegations of corruption, are reports that CIMIC’s Thiess office in Kolkata was raided by Indian police last year, that the company is also facing a potentially damaging lawsuit by a partner in its billion-dollar Middle East joint venture, and that a class action has been launched alleging that certain executives and directors at Leighton Holdings and its successor CIMIC breached their duties and failed to disclose the existence of the liability posed by a multimillion-dollar bribery scandal. As a footnote, the German construction group Hochtief, which owns 71.5% of CIMIC, admitted last February that it had engaged in insider trading before the $1.15bn hostile takeover of Leighton in 2014.

All of this is pretty eye-watering, but when I searched for information about other members of the consortium awarded the Roe 8 contract, it soon became clear that CIMIC is not an orphan. The Australian engineering and consultancy firm GHD, for example, had the distinction of being blacklisted by the World Bank after it was found to have defrauded a fund set up for Indonesian victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

The World Bank’s debarment provisions were invoked to prevent GHD from being awarded contracts for a year after the judgment by the bank’s sanctions board that GHD had engaged in “repeated instances of fraudulent practices” during a US$18m contract. Despite the fact that the company continued to receive government contracts, including here, the fraud was sufficient to lead to investigation by the AFP into whether the company had broken any Australian laws.

The other big Roe 8 contractor, AECOM, has been in trouble on numerous fronts. Within Australia, class actions from investors claiming damages as a result of AECOM’s allegedly inflated traffic projections for the Clem7 tollway in Brisbane seem to have resulted, so far, in payouts of $280m and $121m.

In Canada, a commission of inquiry in Quebec was told by company executives that Tecsult (acquired by AECOM) was part an elaborate price-fixing scheme with other construction firms and local government officials which they knew to be illegal. In the US, Tishman Construction Corporation, a unit of AECOM, agreed to pay $20.2m to resolve an investigation into an alleged fraudulent overbilling scheme, which it admitted to the federal court.

In November last year, AECOM and Bechtel National agreed to pay $125m to resolve allegations that the companies had falsely represented and charged the US Department of Energy for goods and services that were alleged to fall short of the high standards needed for nuclear facilities.

Allegations that Bechtel and URS, which was later acquired by AECOM, bought deficient material for more than a decade with taxpayer money were described as “deeply concerning given the obvious importance of nuclear safety”, by Michael Ormsby, US attorney for the eastern district of Washington. As a result, once AECOM disclosed government investigations and litigation flowing from the acquisition, a complaint was filed in the US district court on behalf of shareholders alleging violations of the Securities Exchange Act in relation to the acquisition of URS Corporation.

But wait, there’s more ...

Fourteen years ago next month, the US and its “coalition of the willing” (including Australia) invaded Iraq to destroy the “weapons of mass destruction” and root out the terrorists (that went well). After the rout of Saddam Hussein’s forces, a large-scale effort to reconstruct Iraqi facilities and infrastructure was mounted.

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AECOM was one of the companies awarded a contract, in its case, to supply the Iraqi army to the tune of US$1.1bn. An audit by the office of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction of the AECOM contract found that AECOM potentially overbilled or could not support more than $4.2m in costs, or 14% of the $30.6m the office was able to examine. Numerous financial irregularities and accounting problems were identified that rendered it almost impossible to reconcile costs against expenditure – creating a situation described as tailor-made for expense padding and outright fraud.

To give an example, documents showed that AECOM exorbitantly overcharged for routine items such as replacement parts: it charged $237 for a vehicle mirrors costing only $14.88, submitted invoices seeking reimbursements of $196.50 for a bag of 10 washers costing only $1.22, $10 for a 45-cent fuse, and $210 for an inner tube that was supposed to cost $24.09. Such assessed charges by AECOM represent cost inflations on cheap, commonly available items in the order of several thousand per cent.

In Canada, where there are strong debarment provisions, it is unlikely that any of these companies could secure government contracts; in Australia, it is business as usual, despite the evident risk to taxpayers. Surely we can do better.