OECD Expresses “Serious Concerns” Over Bribery In Iceland

The OECD Working Group on Bribery has released a statement expressing serious concerns about Iceland’s lack of progress in combatting the bribery of foreign public officials.

In 2010, the Working Group made 17 recommendations to Iceland for improving its fight against foreign bribery. By 2012, just 2 of the recommendations had been implemented.

In the last three years Iceland has created an Inter-Ministerial Steering Group to work on the outstanding recommendations but the OECD say that in fact little to no effort has been made to implement any change.

Iceland also continues to have no foreign bribery enforcement actions.

“The Working Group is especially disappointed that Iceland has not implemented recommendations to effectively criminalise bribery of officials in foreign state-owned entities,” reads the OECD statement.

Additionally the OECD is disappointed that the obligation of officials to report foreign bribery has not been clarified, that there is no legislation in place to protect whistleblowers, and that Iceland has failed to respond to correspondence from the OECD on more than one occasion.