I was one of the speakers at a breakfast seminar last week with the title the UK Bribery Act – Controlling the Impact on the Organisation.The event was organised by ZyLAB whose products are designed, across the various modules, to manage information and compliance within an organisation, and to enable the extraction and disclosure of information when litigation, a regulatory or internal investigation or, as in our immediate context, a Bribery Act implication, affects a company.

The venue was Middle Temple Hall which, I am ashamed to say, I had not entered in the 32 years since I first worked in the area. Building began in 1562; Sir Francis Drake dined there in 1586, having recently returned from the New World with the surviving colonists of Roanoke in what is now North Carolina; the first performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was put on there at Candlemas in 1602. Middle Temple Hall was severely damaged by bombing in a 1941 bombing raid, though coming off better than the buildings which had surrounded it. It is worth going in just to see the photographs of the aftermath of the Blitz.

The event itself took place in two panelled rooms behind the Hall itself, one for refreshments and one laid out as a lecture hall, both overlooking the gardens running down to the Thames. It is quite a challenge to keep the attention of an audience which can look past you onto such a view, and to keep them awake when, as on that day, the sun was streaming in through the windows. I think we managed.

I took copious notes, but will content myself with one or two points made by each speaker. 

Bill Waite, CEO of The Risk Advisory Group suggested in a wide ranging talk that the biggest area of concern was not the direct pressure from the authorities but the commercial pressure applied by would-be contracting parties. Evidence of compliance (and not merely with anti-corruption legislation) was already sought by public and the larger private buyers, and the Bribery Act added another component. How significant that was depended on a number of things, including geographical and industry sector factors as well as your starting point. He did not underestimate the effects of the Bribery Act for some companies, but predicted that pragmatism and proportionality would dictate what happens next.

John Ryan, Compliance Officer – Technology Projects for BNP Paribas gave us the view from the front line. Financial organisations need processes anyway but one important factor was senior management buy-in to compliance projects and the involvement of interested parties – legal, compliance, data security, IT etc. It was necessary to understand your risk, and that involved both the right technology systems and human observation of what was going on.

I indulged my enthusiasm for images, this time with visual ones. An Irish road sign illustrated the punch-line of that old joke ending “Well, I wouldn’t start from here, if I were you” which will be true of some companies. A series of three pictures showed first the ripple caused by a droplet of water falling into a pool, then the trial of Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb and then the Eder Dam on the morning after the Dambusters raid – the German risk assessment suggested that the Eder Dam was adequately protected by the hills which surrounded it. For one company, the effect of the Bribery Act will be like the droplet; for another like the arrival of the bouncing bomb. Henry Ford’s production line illustrated a business process; a mechanic under a car stood for the checks – and adjustments, possibly minimal adjustments – which may need to be made. The Bribery Act, I said, brought a sharper edge to the need for closer attention to information management which is an e-disclosure requirement as well.

These were three free-standing talks with no prior discussion. The same theme came through each of them – what you need to do depends on where you are now, where you do business, what is your present state of compliance and your appetite for risk. It is not just boards of directors who need to ensure that they are ready – the lawyers who will take the anxious calls on the day the prosecutor calls need to know what they will say.

The event included with lunch in Middle Temple Hall and with a tour of the Middle Temple. My thanks to ZyLAB for organising the event, for inviting me to take part, and for choosing such an attractive venue for it.

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