Governments, international organisations and businesses are paying increasingly more attention to corruption , and existing anti-corruption legislation is now being applied more widely and vigorously than before – notably by the United States and the UK. We strongly support these developments and have bolstered our own anti-corruption work with focused in-person training, our group-wide whistle-blower system and compliance with new legislation.
New whistleblower system
The Maersk whistleblower system was launched in January 2011 and is available in 140 countries in more than 40 languages. Employees can submit reports by telephone, via our website or intranet and – which is the preferred means – through the traditional channels of reporting such concerns to managers and/or legal departments internally. The system helps us learn of wrongdoing, so we can take action to stop it. And it gives employees another means of reporting their concerns. Employees can report cases of fraud, corruption, competition law breaches, insider trading, foreign trade controls violations, deliberate breaches of IT security, discrimination and harassment.
Facilitation payments
Facilitation payments – or small sums demanded by government employees in exchange for performing administrative tasks they are legally obliged to perform without such payments – remain a widespread phenomenon in some parts of the world, even when they are illegal. Our policy is to always attempt to avoid them.