Business Transparency and Ethics Programme (PTEE)

The risk the PTEE addresses

The PTEE is not a version of the SAGRILAFT under another name. It addresses the risk that someone pays, offers or receives something improper to win or keep business. In Colombia the administrative liability of legal persons for transnational bribery is governed by Law 1778 of 2016, reinforced by later anti-corruption legislation, and it is investigated by the Superintendence of Companies itself. The company answers for what its employees, its subsidiaries and its intermediaries do, even where management neither authorised nor knew of it.

The intermediary is the weak point

Most cases do not run through a transfer from the company's own account. They run through an agent who says he knows who to talk to, a consultant on a disproportionate success fee, or a distributor invoicing services nobody can describe. That is why the backbone of the programme is third-party due diligence and not the statement of principles in the code.

• Questionnaire and verification before onboarding agents, consultants, distributors, facilitators and local partners.
• Review of how they are paid: success fees, cash payments, invoicing from a third country or with no description of the service rendered.
• Compliance, audit and termination-for-breach clauses in the contract.
• Periodic re-review and a written rule on which finding requires suspending the relationship.

The pieces of the programme

• Code of conduct with rules that can be applied, not statements of principle: what may be done, what may not, and who to ask when in doubt.
• Policy on gifts, hospitality, travel, donations and political contributions, with amounts, approvals and a register.
• Rules for dealing with public officials and for taking part in public procurement processes.
• Whistleblowing channel with confidentiality rules, anonymity where appropriate and an express ban on retaliation.
• Internal investigation protocol: who receives, who investigates, how evidence is preserved and who decides.
• Accounting and documentation rules for payments, expenses, sponsorships and entertainment.

A whistleblowing channel either works or gets in the way

A channel that reports to the manager of the person who might be involved is a channel nobody uses. And a channel that is used but never answers produces the worst possible outcome: evidence that the company knew and did nothing. We design it with the escalation route in writing, with internal response times, with conflict-of-interest rules for whoever investigates, and with criteria for deciding when a matter must leave management and reach the board.

Training and evidence

We train by role: sales and bid teams, procurement, finance and treasury, and senior management. The content changes in each case because the risk changes. And we organise the file that evidences that the programme exists and is applied: approvals, circulation, training records, third-party reviews and compliance officer reports. That file is what the company shows the day the authority, an institutional customer or a buyer asks.

What the client receives

• The bribery risk map of the business, with the points of contact with the public sector identified one by one.
• The code of conduct, the policies and the procedures, approved by the competent body.
• The third-party due diligence procedure and the contract clauses that go with it.
• The whistleblowing channel and the internal investigation protocol.
• The training delivered and the programme's evidence file.

Typical situations we handle

• Companies that export or sell through agents or representatives abroad.
• Companies bidding for public contracts that need a programme able to withstand review.
• Companies joining the supply chain of a customer that demands anti-corruption evidence.
• Companies that have internally spotted a payment or a relationship they cannot explain and need the programme in order before deciding what to do.
• Groups that need one common standard across their companies and a programme that each subsidiary can actually run on its own.