In Renaissance treatises, the figure of the architect is described as having not only technical and cultural qualities, but also moral ones: probity, correctness, prudence and so on. Even then, in short, temptations must have been frequent, and today we all know how things go.
On this subject I would tell a couple of episodes.
One day, Mr. A, who is building the headquarters of his company based on a design by architect B, meets contractor C on the construction site and, while chatting, asks him what he thinks of architect B.
– Bravo, but he is a great fool.
– Why a great fool?
– Because he doesn’t take bribes, but since everyone takes bribes, his clients will surely think that he does too, and he didn’t. Therefore, he is a great fool.
Of course it is not quite true what B thought, and then there are not only the illicit money transfers: often we only face something ethically inappropriate.
In the years of the Italian scandal called Tangentopoli (Bribesville), for example, as Christmas approached, a large building corporation wanted to join to the wishes to the technicians who checked their works to a big public estate with beautiful televisions, very expensive at the time. Even though everyone’s behavior had been fair, the value of the objects embarrassed the recipients, but returning them would have been a rude and unmotivated act: a different solution had to be found. In the end, in order to avoid any misunderstanding, the technicians thanked the corporation, accepted the televisions but decided to turn them over to the Municipality for charity. The only problem was that there was nothing in the municipal administrative net that resembled a ‘Gift Return Office’. So meetings, trips, letters, explanations and a lot of wasted time followed, until finally someone found a ramshackle social club and a remote poor’s hospice that had recently been visited by thieves.
So everyone was happy. Except for the national public broadcasting company, which sent reminders to the technicians for subscriptions: but then all was cleared up.
As everyone knows, bribes must be made always disappear, and here is a very subtle way, simple and in its own very ingenious.
Two technicians, L. and O., are in charge of examining a very important real estate file to check if everything is in order to proceed with the sale of a large complex built by a big company that is now selling it to a state agency. Lawyers, notaries and accountants have already checked what they are responsible for and everything is in order. Now it’s the turn of the technicians: does what has been built match with the project, the specifications, the contract documents, the rules and regulations? If yes, the transaction can take place: a lot of money.
The examination is thorough, pages and pages are skimmed over, and in the end everything is in order from a technical point of view. Perfect.
– Shall we send our check result away? asks O.
– Just a moment, I have to look something, says L.
On the last page of the last document there is a summary table with the total, and this total will be the amount to be included in the contract that a team of experts has already prepared. It’s only a matter of a little while, then everything will be formalized and the deal happily concluded.
But L. looks at the table, and discovers that the total sum is wrong: 2+2 is not 4 but 4.1. Possible? He redoes the count, but it is so: 4.1. General alert.
– Oops! A material error, say the sellers, we’ll correct it immediately.
They make the correction, after which everything is handed over to the notaries and the purchase is concluded. For the buyers, it was fortunate that the file was examined by competent, honest and fussy people like L.: they saved more than a million euros.
Some time later I tell the episode to a friend.
– Do you believe in a mistake? For me it was a bribe. Think about it.
I think about it, and it takes very little to convince me that he is right. It would have been a perfect mechanism: who on earth, after having read a very long and detailed report, would start adding up the last table on the last page? And yet it is on that last figure that resolutions are made and contracts stipulated. Simple as the egg of Columbus.
I would add that L., a very experienced person, probably did not make the check by chance, but because he knew that certain “errors” are anything but rare. And in fact here is a variation on the theme.
One day the members of a large commercial company discover that the shares of the most important partner, Mr. B., a person of international fame (no, he is not Berlusconi), do not correspond to the paid-up capital, but are a little higher, and this does not mean pennies but millions of euros. After due diligence, it is fund that this is the consequence of a small error made at the time of the company’s incorporation: the inadvertent shifting of a line in the table summarizing the shares caused B. to be assigned a different percentage from the one he was entitled to, and, as chance would have it, a rather advantageous one.
The partners: – All clarified, can the correction be made?
Partner B.: – No way!
A very heavy legal battle ensues. In the background, the author of the error is a spectator, a person who is highly esteemed and irreproachable.
But… We know that it’s a sin to think bad, but we guess, isn’t it?
