In upcoming documentary “Bribe, Inc,” one of the key characters is a whistleblower known as Figaro, so named because he requested journalists contact him via an ad placed in French broadsheet Le Figaro.
Like most whistleblowers on camera, he’s shown via a silhouette and with a different voice to hide his identity. But such was the fear over him being caught and the implications of what he was revealing to the camera, that the filmmakers went even further, blurring his already silhouetted image to obscure the shape of his head and body, quarantining his interviews from the rest of the media for safety and not just digitally altering his voice, but getting someone else to speak his words verbatim. For a nice dramatic touch and a hat tip to TV conspiracies, the voice they used was that of William B. Davis, better known as the “smoking man” in “The X-Files.”
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Directed by multiple Emmy-winning documentarian and investigative reporter Peter Klein, “Bribe, Inc” initially follows the work of acclaimed Australian journalist Nick Mckenzie, who —with the help of Figaro and a tranche of emails —broke the story about corruption in Monaco-based company Unaoil, run by the Ahsani family. Mckenzie revealed that Unaoil had been serving as middle men for giant global corporations, using what was described as an “industrial scale bribery operation” to help them win multi-million dollar government-funded projects from oil-rich nations. While the investigation began with reports of bribery by Unaoil on behalf of Australian multi-national company Leighton to secure contracts in Iraq, the various tentacles of the scandal quickly expanded across into many other countries and well-known conglomerates, with potentially huge global reverberations.
It’s for this reason that Klein describes the corruption at the heart of “Bribe, Inc” as the “Jeffrey Epstein story for bribery,” one with “lots of people implicated and lots of people who don’t want their stories told.” And it’s also for this reason that he faced an uphill struggle to make it.
There is plenty in the film that goes beyond the initial investigation. It’s the first time that the whistleblower Figaro has spoken publicly. It’s also the first time Tom Martin, a prosecutor for the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office who was fired over dubious —and later found to be unfair —charges after he went after Unaoil (in a murky story involving underhand behaviour from the U.S. Department of Justice), has spoken publicly. The film also reveals that, upon being arrested by authorities, one of the Ahsani family members was allowed a solitary phone call, which he made to an FBI agent.
But there were many people who simply refused to be involved.
“I’ve done a lot of investigative journalism, but I don’t think I’ve ever had so much resistance from virtually every single person implicated in story,” says Klein, who adds that the only individuals who spoke to him for the film “are the good guys.”
Despite Klein’s best efforts, no former employees of Unaoil or any members of the Ahsani family would talk on the record. While this might be expected, the Serious Fraud Office, which had been aggressively chasing the Ahsanis, also wouldn’t speak, and neither would the Department of Justice or the FBI.
“I have interviewed FBI agents and Department of Justice people on much more controversial and much higher profile stories, ones dealing with national intelligence and all sorts of things, so it’s frankly absurd that they wouldn’t make someone available,” says Klein, who claims they hid behind the fact that it’s an “ongoing case.” Klein also says that that many people who had worked with the Ahsanis actually got in touch to “try to spin me, to convince me not to do the story or to try another angle,” much of it echoing what was faced previously by the investigative reporters.
Despite the resistance, the revelations in “Bribe, Inc” —which Klein is now trying to find a fall festival berth for — are still explosive. But he thinks he’s only “scratched the surface” of how deep the global bribery scandal goes.
“I feel like there are a lot of powerful people who are still implicated in these crimes whose stories have not come out,” he says. “Maybe we’ll keep digging and do a part two.”
