In ‘Bribe, Inc.,’ a Searing Takedown of Corporate Corruption

Misdeeds, major crimes and more mendacity than any one person can keep track of are surging like flood water — or in some cases, wildfire.

When faced with the option to partake of a deep dive into the black hole that is the current state of the world, many people simply cannot do it. It takes endurance, fortitude and a strong stomach. From the number of conversations I’ve had over the past few weeks with people who say they can’t bear to read the news, it seems we’re all short on those things right now.

It’s little wonder that documentary cinema has been having a hard time reaching wider audiences lately. The most acclaimed films of 2024 didn’t attract huge viewership, and distribution collapsed, in part due to big streamers like Netflix cutting costs and largely passing on political films in favour of blander, less controversial fare.

But the experience of seeing a powerful documentary in a theatre and having the opportunity to talk about it afterwards is still one of the most galvanizing things one can do in this moment of ongoing fracture.

Which brings me to Bribe, Inc.

Directed by Vancouver journalist and filmmaker Peter Klein, the film is a precise, cogent and quietly seething takedown of the high cost of doing dirty business.

Klein faced something of an uphill battle in even getting the film made, much less widely seen.

In an interview with Variety, he stated: “I’ve done a lot of investigative journalism, but I don’t think I’ve ever had so much resistance from virtually every single person implicated in story.”

Given the subject of the film, it is not surprising. Money and power have a way of buying silence.

As Bribe, Inc.’s director and executive producer, Klein applies his formidable investigative skills to a damning exposé on what fuels global commerce. An Emmy-award winning journalist based in Vancouver, Klein has been a longtime Tyee collaborator. He founded the Global Reporting Centre at the UBC School of Journalism, which we have long partnered with to publish top-notch journalism. Klein also serves on The Tyee’s board of directors.

Bribe, Inc. follows Australian reporter Nick McKenzie, who received a letter from an anonymous informant who claimed to have access to the biggest corruption story in the world.

McKenzie was initially skeptical. But the letter, covered with stamps and tantalizing in its promise, was sufficient to set him on the trail.

As he explains in the film, “The whole thing was like a spy novel. I travelled halfway around the world for a clandestine meeting with a shadowy figure.”

The intrigue deepened when it was revealed that the Australian company Leighton Holdings had secured international oil contracts in Iraq through the extensive use of bribes.

After a six-month investigation, McKenzie and his team at the Age broke the story, sending shock waves across Australia.

McKenzie notes that even though he knew someone in Iraq was on the take, he didn’t know how the money was getting to them.

The answer was in the letter from the anonymous whistleblower.

The secret meeting that changed everything

McKenzie and the anonymous letter writer made contact through an ad McKenzie placed in Le Figaro, the French newspaper.

McKenzie dubbed his source “Figaro” and booked a flight to Paris. The pair was supposed to meet outside the Louvre. In suitably spy-ish fashion, the unknown source would be standing outside a red newsstand, holding a newspaper.

The measures taken to secure the source’s identity were a further indication that the story was legit. “This man was so scared, he must be sitting on some pretty serious secrets,” McKenzie recalls.

The meeting at the Louvre ultimately failed to materialize. So, McKenzie took a train to Marseille, where he finally met with the mysterious Figaro.

Both men were right to be nervous; the scandal involved the thriving industry of illicit middlemen (also known as “bagmen”) who knew who and how to bribe.

The middlemen functioned as a conduit between oil-rich petrostates and international engineering firms that wanted access to contracts. At the centre of the story was a company called Unaoil.

Founded in Monaco by Ata Ahsani, an Iranian expat and engineer who brought his two sons Cyrus and Saman into the business, Unaoil functioned as an illicit conduit for the global oil industry. The Ahsani family was well-placed to offer this service. They were connected to the wealthy and powerful, from members of royal families to heads of state.

Figaro explained that he worked for Unaoil and had access to a hard drive containing millions of emails.

The cache of documents outlined the scope and scale of malfeasance conducted by the Ahsanis, including detailed information about bribes being offered and taken by some of the world’s most well-known corporations.

The high price of covering corruption

As McKenzie explains in the film, reporting on corruption is extremely difficult as it all takes place in the shadows. The threat to anyone who speaks out is considerable.

In Bribe, Inc., the filmmakers went to considerable lengths to disguise the identity of Figaro, who is seen only in outline with a voice supplied by character actor William B. Davis (fittingly enough, Davis played the popular “Cigarette Smoking Man” on the television series The X-Files).

As McKenzie and a colleague sifted through the thousands of emails supplied by Figaro, they noticed some usual language like the word “holiday” along with different code names like “Big Cheese,” “Teacher” and “Doctor.” As the journalists dug further into the documents, figuring out exactly who these names referred to, they soon discovered that all roads led back to Iraq.

With the fifth-largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq has had companies scrambling for access for more than a century. During the reign of Saddam Hussein, the country sold off many of its oil wells.

After the fall of Hussein, it was thought Iraq’s oil reserves could help to rebuild the nation, but Iraq remains one of the most corrupt nations on the planet, a fact that had incensed the younger generation who inherited a country rife with systemic problems.

As one activist interviewed in the film notes, battling corruption is even more intense than fighting ISIS. Anti-corruption protests routinely turn violent, and Iraqi authorities use live ammunition on the crowds.

Journalists have paid a heavy price for investigating bribery and corruption — the targeted 2020 killing of Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi journalist who was shot outside of his house in Baghdad, makes this terribly clear.

But even people with a degree of power were impacted by the hydra-headed monster of corruption, as the story of Alexandra Wrage indicates.

Wrage is the author of several books on bribery and is part of the Advisory Committee of the Vancouver Anti-Corruption Institute and serves on the board of the Integrity Fellowship and Sanctuary. Wrage founded TRACE, a non-profit international business association committed to anti-bribery initiatives.

Though bribery is viewed as something of a victimless crime, the repercussions on the ground are staggering, Wrage explains. She says those involve drug smuggling, human trafficking and sexual slavery.

With the cost of bribery somewhere in the trillions of dollars, the lack of outrage from the general public is a little confounding.

Whether it’s called a kickback or another less inflammatory term, bribery was long thought to be the cost of doing business. To combat the practice, the U.S. instituted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Foreign Extortion Prevention Act in 1977. Yet right-wing forces denounced it, saying that it placed American companies at a disadvantage on the international stage.

When Wrage was asked to go on CNBC to share her anti-corruption position, she asked jokingly if the network had also secured a pro-corruption proponent for the segment. I’ll give you one guess about who was behind the pro-bribery argument. Hint: He’s on his way back to the White House.

Wrage and her organization were name-checked in the tranche of emails about Unaoil, having given the company a bill of good standing.

But as the correspondence indicated, TRACE had been duped about the nature of Unaoil’s business. McKenzie broke the news about this in an early morning phone call to Wrage, when he peppered her with questions.

The pair joined forces as the quest to take down the Unaoil began to pick up speed. McKenzie understood that the moment the story broke in the press, Unaoil would do their utmost to destroy any evidence. He contacted authorities so that they could get involved before the story went public.

Enter the U.K.’s Tom Martin, a case controller for the Serious Fraud Office. With little more than a week before the publishing deadline, Martin leapt into action with Operation Pivot, an investigation into the allegations of bribery, money laundering and corruption levelled against Unaoil that involved more than 50 experts on the case.

For a moment, it seemed as though justice might prevail.

But did it?

An example of necessary complexity

If this was a narrative film, there would be a triumphant ending; justice would ring out in clarion call.

But documentaries deal with the real world, which doesn’t always conform to narrative arcs.

And in the real world, films that speak truth to power and money are getting harder to see. Although Bribe, Inc. is screening locally, a great many equally important documentaries are difficult to access.

I remember being shocked by the fact that The Sixth, a searing investigation into the events of the Capitol insurrection, was very hard to find, especially in an election year in the U.S.

Other extraordinary films, like Brett Story’s Union and No Other Land have seemingly suffered a similar fate.

While festival screenings are still happening, streaming services are often reluctant to take on overtly political films, meaning larger audiences don’t even have the option to see them.

Whether this simply a reflection of a current desire for escapism or something more insidious, like the attrition, denigration and dissolution of the mainstream media, is hard to say.

But the result is a winnowing down of complex and necessary stories that offer in-depth analysis of the state of things.

‘Bribe, Inc.’ is screening at the VIFF Centre’s Vancity Theatre on Jan. 15, with a panel discussion to follow the film. There are additional screenings on Jan. 22 and 24.