As one of the major law enforcing departments harnessing commercial bribery,
the State Administration For Industry & Commerce (SAIC) has just held a
working conference on "Rectifying Market Order and Harnessing Commercial
Bribery", conducting a meticulous deployment as to harnessing commercial bribery
in industrial and commercial administration system.
At the beginning of this year, the State Council convoked the Fourth Working
Conference on Clean and Honest Administration and constituted a high-level
leading group made up of 22 ministries and commissions. Commercial bribery in
six domains including engineering construction, land transfer, property rights
exchange, pharmaceutical purchase and sales, government purchase, and resource
exploitation and distribution was determined as the key objects to be
harnessed.
Latent rules destroying market order
As the market is getting more and more competitive, commercial bribery has
developed from a kind of concealed behavior in some specific industries at the
beginning into an "influenza" prevalent in various sectors like pharmaceutical,
tourism, construction, commerce, and so on; moreover, commercial bribery, to
some extent, has become the so-called "industrial routine" by which these
industries harvest inappropriate benefits and dirty money.
Zhong Youping, vice minister of SAIC, gave an example of this. During the 10
years from 1993 to 2003, Guangdong Provincial Administration of Industry and
Commerce had investigated into and dealt with 655 cases of commercial bribery,
about 65 cases per year on average; while during the three years from 2003 till
2005, as high as 447 cases of commercial bribery were investigated into and
dealt with in the province, 149 cases per year on average. The number of
commercial bribery cases had risen distinctly and the sums engaged had increased
greatly, which revealed that commercial bribery cases occur at different levels
in various places and various sectors and are presenting a trend of incessant
pervasion. Zhong said, "Those cases investigated and dealt with in the past are
only an edge of the iceberg. It can be said to some extent that commercial
bribery has become a 'latent rule' in certain industries and fields."
Guan Jingfu, deputy director general of Jilin Provincial Administration
of Industry and Commerce, has a strong feeling about that. He told the
reporter that in the system of pharmaceutical purchase and sales, commercial bribery
has become a kind of "anesthetic" and "lubricant"; it has become an
industrial routine that hospitals accept "dissemination fees" and doctors accept
overseas investigation and trainings as well as cashes and gifts offered
by pharmaceutical producers. "Sales with cash bonus" in the alcohol
circulation industry has also become a routine for the sales promotion of alcoholic
drinks that waiters and waitresses in hotels and restaurants "get money with
pack seals, bottle caps or paper seals".
Statistics show that only kickbacks on pharmaceutical sales in the
pharmaceutical industry across the country can result in the embezzlement of
over RMB 700 million of state-owned assets each year, approximately 16 percent
of the annual tax incomes of the nationwide pharmaceutical industry. Thus, it
can be seen that commercial bribery has become a public evil in economic and
social lives and a prominent problem affecting the current market order.
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