Disclosure Responses to a Corruption Scandal: The Case of Siemens AG

Cultural Secrecy and Anti‐corruption Disclosure in Large Multinational Companies

“…Blanc et al. () examine how, in the wake of the 2006 corruption scandal in which it was involved, Siemens used its annual reports and sustainability reports to report about the main stakeholder groups that were referred to in the disclosures pertaining to compliance and corruption issues and involved in such scandal.…”

“…Very few academic studies examine AC disclosure (Barkemeyer et al 2015;Blanc et al 2017aBlanc et al , 2017bHealy and Serafeim 2016;Islam et al 2015Islam et al , 2016Joseph et al 2016). Islam et al (2015) investigate the association between the anti-bribery disclosure practices of two major Chinese telecommunications companies over a 16-year period (1995-2010) and global concerns about bribery activities, and found the changes in the level of these companies' disclosures to be closely associated with global media attention on bribery practices in the Chinese telecommunications industry.…”

“…Joseph et al (2016) offer a descriptive analysis of the AC disclosure practices of companies that participated in sustainability reporting awards in Indonesia and Malaysia. Blanc et al (2017b) examine how, in the wake of the 2006 corruption scandal in which it was involved, Siemens used its annual reports and sustainability reports to report about the main stakeholder groups that were referred to in the disclosures pertaining to compliance and corruption issues and involved in such scandal.…”

“…To date, few published academic studies examine corporate AC disclosure practices (Barkemeyer et al 2015;Blanc et al 2017aBlanc et al , 2017bHealy and Serafeim 2016;Islam et al 2015Islam et al , 2016Joseph et al 2016;), and of these, only Barkemeyer et al (2015), Healy and Serafeim (2016) and Blanc et al (2017a) quantitatively address the company-and country-level factors influencing AC disclosure. However, none of them examines the relation between national cultural values and AC disclosure.…”

Last big corporate scandals in Brazil: Why investors did not see it in the annual reports?

“…According to Blanc et al (2017), the disclosure of anticorruption information could work as a tool in the fight against corruption for the following reasons: (1) it would help to hold organizations accountable for their performance and success in their efforts to combat corruption; (2) it would raise awareness in society; (3) it would encourage other organizations to adopt similar standards; and (4) it would heighten the possibility of putting into practice only what is really efficient for the fight against corruption, developing exclusively the necessary, as the most effective corporate governance practices.…”