Last week The Washington Post published a report on a bribery case relating to the award of a contract for operating a hospital in Saudi Arabia. The paper said a grand jury in Birmingham, Alabama, indicted two senior executives from Health South Corp. in a corruption charge relating to the awarding of a $50 million contract for the operation of the hospital.
The two defendants, the company’s former director and its legal department manager, admitted to having agreed to pay SR500,000 over a period of five years to a Saudi civil servant for granting their company the contract to run the 450-bed hospital.
The state attorney general handling the case said FBI agents found out about the case from the company’s new management after they started reviewing the company’s financial records.
Now, what is our investigation commission doing about all this? Was the commission aware of the case, and if so did it follow it up? The worst case scenario is that the commission knows nothing. That was what happened in an earlier case involving Lucent Technologies, which has been accused by a Saudi firm of paying a bribe of $5 million to a former employee of Saudi Telecom.
Now that a grand jury in the United States has indicted the two former Health South Corp. executives and the news has appeared in a widely read American newspaper whose voice is heard throughout political and financial circles, the commission should send representatives to the US to examine the documents relating to the case and conduct its own investigation and questioning of the Saudi who is said to have been involved in the case.
Measures like these should constitute the core of the commission’s work. It is after all the authority entrusted with fighting all kinds of corruption in the Kingdom. Failure to do so will mean the outside world is going to lose confidence in us and discourage the foreign investment we are supposedly seeking.
