I ask because in Massachusetts, the ex-speaker of the MA House of Representatives (Sal DiMasi) goes on trial for bribery and corruption this June.
Mr. DiMasi is accused of accepting kickbacks/bribes from Cognos Corporation, a Canadian software company.
According to the indictment, Cognos supplied DiMasi with about $52,000, in order to get a state contract.
My question: is there any investigation going on in Canada, over this? Realize that the offenses took place on American soil, but how does Cognos explain to its shareholders, how they funneled cash to a corrupt Massachusetts politician?
Sal is quite a guy-he was always the type of politician who “got things done”-provided you gave him enough cash.
In any case, has there been any thing about this in Canada?
Cognos is owned by IBM.
Actually to expand on that, Cognos was acquired in 2008 by IBM while this business apparently took place in 2007.
Regardless I’ve never heard anything about a Canadian investigation into Cognos.
I know when I worked for a large Canadian corporation, they had a whole slew of “ethical business practice” rules we had to acknowledge and sign. Apart from the fact that their corporate lawyers were morons, these guidelines included things like “bribery is illegal” and how to distinguish bribes (big dollars) from “facilitating payments” (the $20 you slip the 3rd-world customs guy so he will let you board your plane*). Facilitating payments were permissible but had to be reported to your superiors.
OTOH, never heard anything about Cognos. However, IIRC the bribery issue is probably more of a SEC or OSC (Ontario Securities Commission) thing, meaning unless the company is publicly traded there’s nothing to investigate. If the bribery itself happened in the USA, any criminal issues would be pursued by US authorities.
*This is no joke. One country, the instruction was “never wait until the last minute to leave”. Apparently if your visa expired that day, they would delay you several hours until it expired, then toss you in jail for being in the country illegally - meaning a much bigger bribe should be forthcoming. One poor sap who didn’t know the ropes got lost in the system for several days before the corporate “fixers” found him.
By the way, asking about federal criminal offenses in Canada is a bit redundant, since criminal law in Canada is exclusively under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
To answer your second question first, I’ve heard nothing in our mainstream media about it. It may have been in the business media, which I typically do not follow, though.
Your first question above may need more information in order to answer. At the time in question, what was the corporate setup of Cognos in the US, and more specifically, Massachusetts?
The reason I ask is that it is not uncommon for companies to incorporate themselves, in whatever jurisdictions they operate in, as wholly-separate entities from the head office. Doing this creates a liability shield (often called the “corporate veil”) between the owners and the corporation itself. For example, head office may be based in Boston, Massachusetts, but it incorporated its Toronto, Ontario operation under the laws of the province of Ontario. The only relation between the Massachusetts head office and the Ontario corporation (outside of the product or service being offered) is that head office owns 100% of the shares of the Ontario corporation. The head office (the owner) is thus protected, by the corporate veil, from any liability incurred by the Ontario corporation, in other words; and the Massachusetts head office cannot be liable for what the Ontario corporation does. Flip the jurisdictions around (head office in Ontario, subsidiary corporation in Massachusetts) and we’re on point with your scenario: the Ontario head office is protected from liabilities incurred by the Massachusetts corporation.
Now, I don’t know if what I’ve suggested is the case here–I honestly have no clue about Cognos’s Massachusetts operation, or of Massachusetts business law, or how companies typically incorporate and operate in that jurisdiction. But I would suggest that the protection offered by the “corporate veil” may offer a very good reason why Cognos’s Canadian operation is not being investigated by any authorities for what its Massachusetts operation did.
Canada has the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act, which makes it illegal for a Canadian company to bribe foreign officials, either directly or indirectly.