US Firm Admits Bribing INS Officials

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The world's leading insurance, reinsurance and and risk consultant has settled out of court with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), admitting the company bribed officials of the National Insurance Institute (INS),

Besides Costa Rica, Aon corporation admitted paying out some $3.6 million in bribes to officials in Egypt, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Under plea agreement, the firm paid out $16 million in fines to DOJ and SEC.

This is not the first time that a foreign company has been caught bribing local officials. Earlier, the French telecom giant Alcatel was fined after a plea agreement under the foreign corruption act.

In that case, ex-President Miguel Angel Rodriguez as sentenced by a local court to jail along with other former Costa Rican officials. That sentence is pending under appeal. In the Aon case, nine former INS officials have been charged with corruption but the matter has yet to come to trial.

In the U.S. case, no INS officials were named in the bribery trial. But they were named in the London trial of PWS, a British insurance firm, also charged with bribing foreign officials.

But the local trial will have to do with alleged use by INS officials of a funds appropriated for training INS employees. The DOJ case charged that Aon gained business worth more than $11 million by paying bribes in the above named nations.

The DOJ investigation arrived at the conclusion that the majority of bribes paid to INS officials came in the form of paid foreign travel for the officials and their wives. Aon, a Chicago-based company, avoided prosecution with its cooperation, said the DOJ.

In this country, INS president since 2006, Guillermo Constenla, noted that the institute was the one that brought the case to the attention of judicial investigators. He noted the similarity between the PWS and Aon cases.

It was the SEC that blew the whistle on Aon, detecting irregularities in the company payments. In 2007, the company put into practice an "anticorruption program" but INS complains that at no time did the company place information at the Institute's disposal to allow it to take legal action against errant officials.

INS was an insurance monopoly until a new law opened the insurance market to competition in 2008. According to the watchdog agency, SUGESE, created by the law, the opening of the insurance market actually benefited INS by causing the company to react to competition with more offerings in personal insurance such as health coverage.