When Bribing a Prince Costs Less Than It Pays -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

A Dutch construction behemoth funneled $31 million to a Saudi Arabian princeling for eight years to secure a piece of the most lavish component of the $25 billion Riyadh Metro, one of the largest infrastructure projects in the world. In March last year, Strukton – the company involved – offered to pay the Dutch state €10 million to forget about the whole incident. The bribe, upon weighing the scales, was almost three times more too heavy than the punishment. In which universe does this count as justice and not just a receipt?

In 2026, this is grotesque maths of corporate corruption In return for a contract worth approximately €1 billion awarded to Strukton to assist in constructing the strategic automated lines of shared Riyadh Metro, Strukton routed payments through an intermediary agent to a senior royal member in Saudi Arabia between February 2013 and June 2021 (Willkie Compliance Concourse. It even went so far as to lie about the scheme in an export-credit insurance application that said it had paid its “agent” $1.5 million, when it was actually $27.5 million, in order to conceal the payments from its own government. Now that is not a failure to comply. That is willful fraud against the taxpayers of a nation that brags about its transparency rankings.

And how was it caught? Not out of any business morality, but because Dutch tax investigators raided the Utrecht HQ of Strukton in February 2019 after auditors had tripped antipodean discrepancies which the company itself had concealed for years. Another seven years for Dutch investigators — the Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD) — to wrangle a settlement from the company; but even then, prosecutors allowed the corporation itself to get away with a penalty while individual former executives were subjected to separate, still-ongoing prosecution. The firm that operated the scheme dodges a ticking bill and the names of humans who allegedly signed checks are filed away, for now unpunished.

It is the predictable absurdity of how transnational bribery enforcement now operates: a Global North company corrupts an official in an adjacent monarchy in the Global South, its own home regulators catch it out, and there follows no trial, no conviction recorded against the company on record anywhere but a quiet settlement with none of its hardly politicians suffering from serious or long-term consequences. The statement from the Dutch prosecutor acknowledged, “Strukton does not accept liability”, even as it took responsibility for the facts. Meanwhile in Riyadh this is still the metro that their bribery built — concrete and rails seeping with the vestiges of a mired tender — but no one talks of tearing it up or clawing back the underlying contract.

Strukton now claims it has “withdrawn” from non-European markets and cleaned up its compliance culture. Expedient remorse, coming only after the money had been collected and the statute of limitations clock begun to tick. This is not deterrence — it is a cost of business as usual, factored into the margins of any mega-project bid from Riyadh to Jakarta. If €10 million to pay off a prince and falsify state documents is the rate then every construction giant on earth has just received a business case for corruption, not a warning against it! As long as enforcement is not in fact more costly than the crime to do, “anti-bribery compliance” will remain a polite fiction masquerading as the rule of law as it has for mega-infrastructure.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia