The stories of bribery and corruption in the Third World are legendary- and usually splashed across newspapers in the United States.

When an international organisation came up with an index of the world's most corrupt nations, the front-runners included Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, China, South Korea and Taiwan.

The least corrupt nations were from the Western world, mostly the Nordic countries.

When Pakistan was downgraded from number one to number two in the annual rankings, the joke was that the Pakistanis had bribed their way to take second place to the Nigerians.

At one time, Indonesia was described as the only country in the world where you can obtain a receipt when you bribe someone.

And if you want to survive a grilling by customs or immigration officers in the notorious Lagos airport in Nigeria, you need a stack of dollar bills to walk out unmolested.

But after a recent crackdown by the government of President Olesegun Obasanjo, you could get out of the clutches of customs officers with a few ball point pens.

But in reality Pakistan, Indonesia and Nigeria are no worse than Russia, Italy, Japan or even the United States.

If bribery and corruption take place in arithmetic proportions in developing nations - best described as peanuts- they assume geometric proportions in the world's richer countries.

The revelations about corporate fraud in the United States during the past few months have shaken money markets and undermined the confidence of investors in this country.

The phenomenal growth of corruption- including corporate fraud, tax evasion, stock manipulation and insider trading- is really giving capitalism a bad name in the United States.

Gary Trudeau, the cartoonist who created Doonesbury, says the business section of American newspapers these days look like a crime page.

The corporate giants hit by financial scandals include Enron, Arthur Andersen, Halliburton, Adelphia, R.J. Reynolds, Tyco, Bristol-Myers, Global Crossing, QWest Communications and WorldCom.

Even Computer Associates, whose chief executive officer is a Sri Lankan expatriate, is now under federal investigation for inflating its earnings in the late 1990s in an attempt to enrich its top executives who received some $1.1 billion worth of company stocks linked to the performance of stock prices.

The company, based in New York, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the watchdog body of American business.

But since the law in most countries is heavily weighted against the poor, the rich white collar criminals usually get out with minimum punishment for their multi-million dollar crimes.

Or they hire hotshot lawyers- as in the United States- to help wriggle them out of loopholes in the law.

Conscious of this, the US Senate has moved in to pass fresh legislation to give prosecutors new weapons against corporate frauds which have resulted in hundreds and thousands of workers being laid off, investors losing their investments and retirees forgoing their old-age pensions.

Last week, President George W. Bush emphasised the importance of character and conscience to business executives who have traditionally subscribed to the philosophy expounded by Michael Douglas in the movie "Wall Street" - "greed is good".

Bush promised to create a corporate fraud task force to investigate future criminal activity in the business world and urged corporate boards to bar loans to executives.

He also vowed to "end the days of cooking the books, shading the truth and breaking our laws".

The Securities and Exchange Commission is to be strengthened to give it more bite than bark. Additionally, he has called for increased time in prison for criminal fraud committed by corporate officers and directors.

But since big corporations are the major sources of funding for politicians in this country- and they were also some of the biggest contributors to Bush's presidential campaign- there are sceptics who doubt whether white collar criminals will ever pay for their crimes.

Perhaps the most telling comment came from Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who denounced corporate exececutives who wreck their companies "and walk away scot free" with millions of dollars as compensation.

"The comfort might be a little bit less if, instead of a very large mansion, they're in a 12-by-12 jail cell behind steel doors."

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