Eighteen months into China’s anti-corruption campaign, officials are still being removed from positions of power every day – and corporations and business people are increasingly caught up in the investigations, too.
GlaxoSmithKline was caught in the middle of this campaign a year ago, with evidence emerging that the UK drugmaker’s managers bribed doctors and officials with large sums of money. The scandal is among the most high-profile corporate corruption stories in China, with television stations repeatedly broadcasting the lurid details. With the company’s confirmation last month that executives had been emailed a secretly filmed sex video of Mark Reilly, then the company’s China head, the scandal made headlines worldwide.
Executives are asking why GSK, of all the multinationals operating in China, has been picked on – and what the case means for their own businesses in the country.