Mabey & Johnson - Corrupt firm's work found to be defective

A British company that corruptly acquired multimillion-pound commercial deals in Africa delivered faulty and negligent work in those contracts, it can be disclosed.

Mabey & Johnson, a bridge-building firm, is the first major British company to be prosecuted for paying backhanders abroad. The Reading-based company, owned by one of Britain's richest families, has admitted paying bribes to win contracts in Ghana, Jamaica and Iraq.

However, it has now emerged that the bridges it had been paid to build in Ghana were defective. According to a high court judgment, the firm had to spend more than £2m rebuilding and repairing the bridges. The weakened bridges contained a variety of design faults after Mabey staff had made simple engineering miscalculations.

Today, Mabey & Johnson pleaded guilty to corruption offences in the three countries at Southwark crown court in London. The company, which has donated to the Conservative party, will learn of its punishment on 25 September.

The prosecution by the Serious Fraud Office has been trumpeted by the British government, which has been under pressure to bring more corrupt exporters to book. Critics say Britain's performance has been lamentable since it promised in 1997 to stamp out the payment of bribes by British companies to foreign ministers and civil servants.

Mabey & Johnson has admitted conspiring to give corrupt payments to so far unnamed politicians and officials in Ghana in the 1990s when it was awarded contracts from the impoverished West African country worth £22m to construct nine bridges in rural areas.

But after Mabey started work there its managers found that one of its bridges with the same design became unstable and partially collapsed in Ethiopia in 1996. The managers feared that its bridges in Ghana might also fall down. Three bridges were rebuilt and five others repaired. A dispute with their insurers over who should foot the bill for the repair work was heard in the high court in London in 2003. The judge ruled that the engineering miscalculations were "fairly basic" and "negligent".

A Mabey spokesman said : "As a sign of good faith, and as soon as it became aware of the issue, the company took action at its own expense to remedy the problem in situ with a total of eight bridges. As a result of these events we stopped supplying this type of bridge."

Mabey received financial support for the contracts from the British government. The company says it builds "quick, simple, reliable" bridges in 115 countries.

The SFO has also examined corruption allegations involving Mabey & Johnson in the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Panama and the Dominican Republic in the last five years, later dropping its inquiries. Mabey & Johnson admitted making corrupt payments of £360,000 to Saddam Hussein's regime in 2001-2.

In Jamaica, a politician, Joseph Hibbert, resigned from the government last month saying he had been "implicated" in the bribery and wanted to clear his name.