Microsoft, which was accused by a former employee of paying bribes in Africa and the Middle East, said it had already investigated the allegations and fired employees as a result.
Yasser Al-Abed, a former employee at Microsoft, accused the leading technology company of corruption in the Wall Street Journal as well as in an article on the Lyons website that publishes whistleblower testimonies. In them, he explained that he was fired following working with Microsoft between 1998 and 2018 in Africa, claiming that he saw employees of the company commit acts of corruption in a number of countries in the region.
Al-Abed stated that among the violations was the use of local partner companies to help sell Microsoft products, according to the statement The BBC reported.
In the lengthy article published by Lyons, Al-Abed recounted his career with the American company, since 1998, and how he contributed to its great expansion in the Middle East and African countries, mentioning dozens of deals that Microsoft made with governments and security and military agencies in the region. He stopped in particular in 2016, when he suspected an unclear $40,000 deal.
And in the year 2020, the truth began to unfold, following a former colleague residing in Saudi Arabia provided him with a set of documents and emails that revealed the depth of Microsoft’s corruption in the Middle East and Africa. Through these messages, Al-Abed discovered that the process of selling any software or product that goes through a suspicious stage perpetuates corruption, which is the conclusion of side agreements between the sales representative in the company, a manager at “Microsoft” and the customer himself. The representative sends a request for a discount to sell the product and actually gets it, but he sells it for the full amount to the customer, following which the profits are distributed to the parties to the deal, i.e. the representative, the manager in the company, and the employee representing the company that buys the product, often a government employee.
In response to the accusations, Agence France-Presse quoted a Microsoft executive as saying: “We believe we have previously investigated and addressed these allegations, which go back many years.” “We’ve worked with government agencies to address any concerns,” said Becky Linaburg, corporate vice president and deputy commissioner for compliance and ethics at Microsoft.
Microsoft said it had fired employees and terminated partnership contracts, in response to the original allegations. “We are committed to doing business responsibly,” Linaburg said. “Microsoft always encourages anyone to report anything they see as a violation of the law, our policies, and ethical standards,” she added.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Al-Abed had already notified the US Financial Supervisory Authority regarding his concerns in 2019. In the documents he submitted, he alleged that Microsoft had been involved for many years in rampant bribery practices. According to the technical news site, The Verge, he estimated Al-Abd said the company spent more than $200 million a year on kickbacks and kickbacks in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia.
