Interview with a winner of the Ending Corruption competition: the Business Anti-Corruption Portal for small- and medium-sized enterprises operating in emerging markets.

"Bribery was actually tax-deductible in all OECD countries until 2000,” says Jens Berthelsen, a partner with Global Advice Network based in Denmark, in the interview posted above. “No wonder that third world countries lost jobs to Western countries, because the Western ones actually had government-subsidized corruption!"

But in order to persuade businesses not to tolerate corruption as a necessary evil in some countries, you "don’t talk morality -- talk business," Berthelsen admonishes. "The way you deal with businesses (is to stress) new challenges, new competencies . . . this might be a new way of looking at generating business . . . we are a kind of business facilitator."

Citizen organizations are also using the web portal to help them operate in corrupt environments, and they feed it information about local corruption practices in order to strengthen the tool, Berthelsen said.

Global Advice Network’s Business Anti-Corruption Portal has evolved into a platform for cooperation between businesses, civil society, the Danish International Development Agency, and embassies. To expand this tool and keep offering it for free, ownership is being expanded to six governments and local partnerships are being formed with citizen, business, development, and export credit organizations.