Avon Products helps the plain look pretty. Now it is paying $135 million to U.S. authorities for doing something similar in China. The New York based cosmetics maker’s local subsidiary disguised payments and gifts to officials in the People’s Republic in order to win business and evade U.S. graft controls. Avon has scrubbed itself clean, but the widespread belief that bribery pays in China still lingers.
An Avon employee cited in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filing best explains the problem: “most of the time [we] have to fight in a muddy field, if we get on our hands some dirt, it is not our fault!”. Using that oddly-worded logic, Avon’s China business gave out Gucci handbags, cash, dinners and holidays to Macau between 2004 and 2008. An employee told Avon’s internal auditors that officials would “sever their ties” with the company if it kept records.
Behaviour once thought de rigeur in China is coming under scrutiny. GlaxoSmithKline, the UK drug-maker paid a 297 million pound fine in September over bribes in China, even though the healthcare market remains riddled with corruption. Investment banks like JPMorgan are being probed by U.S. regulators over their hiring of family members of officials. Yet the fear is that being good isn’t compatible with being successful. Avon’s revenue from China has slumped since 2010, two years after it started its own investigations.
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