Corruption, what's that?

Corruption is something that is happening in other countries. Not in Sweden. We tend to close our eyes and call it innocence.

There is a recent example in the papers; a company producing non quality food portions to be delivered to hospitals for millions. What's wrong with that? If the people being responsible for hospitals (in Sweden it's called landsting) want to save money by giving sick people lousy food, what so surprising with that? Kids get lousy food in the schools every day in order to save money..

Well, the problem is, as far as I understand, that maybe they don't even save money in the end, because the very large several year contract was not (according to the papers) trieted properly, having several companies bidding and a decision taken according to sound business principals (now again, I don't have a clue, I only repeat things I've understood from the press).

In this particular case they have pointed out the responsible person, a politician. (Poor woman, it must be stressful to be interviewed in the papers when something has gone wrong.) Of course she claims that she didn't know about any details, she trusted some other people, some paid experts to deal with these things. And when the papers ask if she isn't planning to resign, (isn't that rude?) she sais "no" with the following explanation; "people resign here and there, but the difference is that those people did things deliberately wrong, but I didn't." Being incompetent and not being aware of what was going on seems to be a reason to hold on to a position as responsible politician.

Let's ask ourselves some elementary questions in relation to this business. If it is true what is written in the papers, the company that won the contract, knew that they were going to win the contract long before the decision was taken, and even built a factory in advance. And that some reports with negative information about that food, never reached the politicians taking the decision. Then the question is; who gained something on this business, apart from the company that got the deal?

Did any of these people handling this purchase had any connection to the company? Were they relatives or best friends? Or was someone working for the landsting paid in order to make sure the company won the deal?

Those type of questions would have been asked in any country that knows the meaning of the word corruption. Not in Sweden. The papers (as far as I've seen) only deal with the question if the politician had made something wrong or not. Only if she only was innocent (and incompetent) or not...

My conclusion is that Swedes are a very innocent people. We don't think corruption is happening around us. We also think it is ok to be incompetent.

Another interesting questions is; what would have happened if she would have done her job properly?
Let's imagine that there were some sort of connection between the people that was hired to handle the purchase and the company that won the contract. Let's imagine that she had revealed a large corruption in the landsting bureaucracy. What would the difference had been?
1) she would not have been innocent any longer
2) she would have gotten a lot of enemies, internally in her own organisation. Those enemies would propably have known how to play the game and managed to get rid of her one way or another.

Maybe she understood that. Maybe she was a smart politician who didn't want to investigate a possible corruption in her own organisation, and possibly destroy her own carreer? What do you think?