Jan de Rover sat back in his chair, his feet resting on the piles of paperwork on his desk. He watched a jet flying low over the greenhouses as it came in to land at Amsterdam airport. He was thinking about his next trip to Moscow, where he was trying to sell flowers, which his company grew under glass. ‘I’m not looking forward to going’, he told his financial director Rob, who was also watching the plane. ‘It’s frightening over there, you know?’ Sitting up, he leaned over his desk and said: ‘You won’t believe what the Russian mafia gets up to. Their tentacles are everywhere. And you never know where you are with them, they’re so unpredictable.
Do you know there was a shooting incident last week – about flowers, would you believe it!’
Jan’s company is all about flowers – acres of greenhouses, a dozen trucks to transport the flowers to the flower auction just round the corner, two hundred employees, including seasonal workers, and the office building where everything is managed. He exports 120 million flowers to all parts of the world, including Eastern and Southern Europe, North and South America. Forty dozen flowers are sent to Russia each week.
The time factor plays an important role here since flowers will not survive any long transport delay.
The prices of flowers sent to Russia are automatically set 30 per cent higher. The difference in price is given to the mafia, otherwise the flowers would never arrive at their destination on time. For Jan this is the only way to overcome the problems caused by the poor infrastructure. Bribes are the only way, for example, to make sure that the flowers get loaded on to local transport before they start wilting. Even then, however, as Jan explains to his financial director, you never know beforehand whether they’re going to accept the bribe.
Rob is not happy with these ‘facilitation payments’ either. Nor is he happy about the fact that the eventual payments for the flowers take ages to reach Holland. In some cases it has taken over a year before the money has been transferred – and then without any excuse or apology. If this happened in his own country, the company would stop any further deliveries. ‘If you ask me’, said Rob to his boss, ‘I reckon the Russians and the mafia are in it together.’ Jan nodded his head in reluctant agreement.

Questions

1. Jan believes that paying bribes is the only way to overcome the problems caused by the poor infrastructure in Russia. Is this really the only way of tackling these problems?

2. How do you explain Rob’s comment that ‘the Russians and the mafia are in it together’?