Anti-Bribery for Sales · Module 2 of 2

Tender

A £2.8M bid. Five days from submission, your bid manager wants to send rugby tickets to the prospect's procurement lead.

Portrait of Sam Holt, Senior Account Director at Meridian Engineering
Your Role

Sam Holt

Senior Account Director, Meridian Engineering

Module 1 was Haldane. You were on the receiving end. Now you're running point on a new bid. £2.8M of pressure-testing kit for the Linsel Group's North Sea programme. Submission Friday next week. You have not won this account before. Today, your own bid team wants to send hospitality the other way.

The bid. Three suppliers shortlisted by Linsel: Meridian, Calthorpe Industrial, and Nordic Precision AS. Submission deadline next Friday. Award decision the Monday after.

Meridian's giving-side rule. Any hospitality offered to a prospect during a live tender must be pre-cleared by Naomi. The threshold is the same £250 you saw in Module 1, applied in the giving direction.

The cast. Joe Harding runs your bid. Naomi Aldridge is still compliance. Iona Whitfield is still CFO. Diana Pomeroy is Procurement Director at Linsel and the person scoring your bid. Aaron Whitlock is the BD analyst Joe assigned to the bid, eight months in, attended your onboarding.

Before You Start

How This Works

A branching scenario. The choices you make shape whether the bid lands cleanly, whether it lands at all, and where you sit on the right side of s.1.

+3 The move that protects the bid AND keeps Meridian off the regulator's file.
+1 Defensible but partial. You'll see what got missed.
−2 Looks like sales hustle. Reads as inducement to a prosecutor.

Tip: Highlighted text like Section 1 is clickable. Tap to read the underlying law in full.

Portrait of Joe Harding, Bid Manager
Monday, 5:55 PM · bid room, Meridian HQ
Narrator

Bid wash-up. Joe at the whiteboard. Pricing locked. Technical narrative still in play.

Joe Harding

Sam, before you go. Diana Pomeroy at Linsel. Never won an account with her, never lost one. All she's ever said on a call is "I look forward to the proposal".

Joe Harding

Calthorpe took her to Twickenham in March. Hosted box, England v Wales. I've got two tickets for the autumn international next Saturday, sitting in my drawer.

Sam Holt

Submission is Friday week. Award the Monday after.

Joe Harding

I know. That's why I want them sent now, not after. Get our face in front of her before the proposal lands. Calthorpe will do it again. If we don't match, our paper does all the lifting and Diana doesn't know us.

Two tickets, England v South Africa, Twickenham, hosted box~£480
Hospitality (food, drinks)~£140
Estimated total per recipient£620
Joe Harding

I'll log it the moment we send. Let me get this moving tonight.

Portrait of Sam Holt
⚖ Decision Point 1 of 3

Joe is twenty-two years in. He's won deals you haven't. Tickets are £620 a head. Submission in ten days. You're senior on the bid, so whatever Joe sends goes out under your name too. He's waiting on you. He hasn't asked Naomi.

What do you say back to Joe?

Your choice

Stop the tickets. Propose a working lunch instead, through Naomi.

Tickets don't go. £620 a head, ten days from submission, to the buyer scoring the bid, hits both Section 1 indicators on value and timing. Counter-propose a working lunch, sub-£100 a head, agenda shared, pre-cleared by Naomi. Face-time happens, inducement reading doesn't.

Your choice

Tell Joe to hold. Take it to Naomi first thing tomorrow.

Nothing goes tonight. Walk into Naomi's office Tuesday with the offer on paper, ask her to pre-clear or refuse. Defensible. But it leaves Joe expecting it's still on, and you've punted the call rather than made it.

Your choice

Send the tickets tonight. Log them in the register after the bid lands.

Joe knows the market. Calthorpe will send tickets. The Bribery Act doesn't prohibit reasonable hospitality. Out the door tonight, log when the proposal is in, brief Naomi after award. The only question is matching the competition.

Portrait of Joe Harding
Monday, 6:08 PM · bid room +3
Sam Holt

Joe, the tickets don't go. £620 a head into Diana's diary, ten days from submission, is the textbook s.1 problem. I'm not running it past Naomi for a yes. The answer is no.

Joe Harding

Calthorpe will. We lose this on whose face she remembers.

Sam Holt

Then get face-time differently. Working lunch, sub-£100 a head, agenda shared, three engineers walking her through the test rig. Naomi clears it by tomorrow lunchtime.

Sam Holt

Diana's a procurement director on a £2.8M decision. She wants the technical case, not a hosted box. Calthorpe sending tickets isn't a strategy. It's a habit.

Narrator

Joe doesn't agree. But he doesn't push. Tickets stay in the drawer. Naomi pre-clears the lunch at 11:02 the next morning.

Why This Held Up

The Section 1 test asks whether the advantage was given intending to induce improper performance. Stopping the tickets before they leave the office removes the offer entirely. The SFO hospitality guidance names value and timing as the two flags. A sub-£100 working lunch with an agenda shared in advance reframes it as legitimate technical engagement, satisfies MoJ Principle 1, and the pre-clear lands in writing before the spend.

Portrait of Naomi Aldridge
Tuesday, 8:35 AM · Naomi's office +1
Sam Holt

Joe wants to send these to Diana Pomeroy at Linsel. £620 a head. Submission Friday week. I told him to hold.

Naomi Aldridge

Refused. Easy call. Twice the threshold, ten days from a £2.8M award. There's no version of this that pre-clears.

Naomi Aldridge

But Sam, you knew the answer last night. Joe's spent fifteen hours assuming this might still go.

The Gap That Cost You The Top Mark

Holding overnight and letting Naomi write the refusal is defensible. The tickets didn't go. But under MoJ Principle 5, the salesperson closest to the deal is meant to recognise the s.1 indicators on the spot. Punting to Naomi signals it's a procedural question rather than an obvious no, which makes the next ask harder to refuse. SFO hospitality guidance says the same: value plus timing equals inducement risk, intent or not.

Portrait of Joe Harding
Monday, 7:42 PM −2
Sam Holt

Send them. Courier, gift card, "looking forward to the proposal, hope you can use these". Log it tomorrow, brief Naomi after the bid lands.

Narrator

Tickets go out by courier Tuesday. The card mentions the proposal twice. Diana's PA opens the package at 11:08, photographs the gift card, forwards it to her boss: "Submission Friday week. Tickets received today. Logging on the buyer-side register and flagging to internal audit. Recommend declining."

The "Everyone Does It" Trap, Mirrored

Section 1 makes it an offence to give an advantage intending to induce improper performance. The SFO hospitality guidance names value and timing as the two strongest indicators, and £620 ten days before a £2.8M award hits both. Logging after sending documents the offence rather than preventing it. Meridian's Section 7 defence is now harder to run: the senior salesperson approved the hospitality the policy exists to stop.

Wednesday, 2:18 PM · bid room
Narrator

Aaron Whitlock catches you by the bid-room kettle. Eight months at Meridian. He sat through the same anti-bribery onboarding you sat through twelve years ago.

Aaron Whitlock

Sam, can I check something. Joe asked me yesterday to quietly find out Diana Pomeroy's home address. He didn't say why. I haven't done it. I'm assuming the rugby thing is still alive in his head, even after Monday.

Aaron Whitlock

Also. I asked Naomi for a quick read on what we can and can't do, and she said the only person on this bid who's pre-cleared anything is you. Joe hasn't filed a single hospitality entry in eighteen months. I don't know if that's normal.

Narrator

It's not normal. It means whatever Joe sent on previous bids, he sent without ledger trail. Before you take that anywhere, you owe yourself one careful look at this bid file.

Wednesday, 2:40 PM · your laptop

The Linsel bid file, on one page.

You open the bid tracker and the giving-side hospitality register side by side.

DetailValue
ProspectLinsel Group · UK industrial water & energy infrastructure
Bid value£2.8M · pressure-testing equipment, North Sea programme
Buyer scoring the bidDiana Pomeroy, Procurement Director, Linsel Group
Submission deadlineFriday next week · 10 calendar days
Award decisionMonday after submission
Hospitality offered to date by Meridian (this bid)None recorded
Hospitality offered by Joe Harding, last 18 months (any client)Zero entries on the giving-side register
Joe's proposed offer (Monday)2 tickets · ~£620 to Diana Pomeroy
Today's request to AaronDiana Pomeroy's home address, no stated reason
Pre-clear threshold (live tender)£250

Either Joe is genuinely catching the rugby idea for the first time, in which case the eighteen-month register gap is hygiene. Or Joe sends gifts on bids and doesn't log them, in which case the rugby idea is a pattern, and the home-address request changes what kind of pattern.

Naomi has just emailed: "Sam, free at 4? Aaron flagged something. Want to walk through what I have on Joe's giving history before you decide what to do."

Activity · Score Joe's Gift Against The Indicators

Three SFO indicators sit across the top. Five facts about Joe's offer sit down the side. Click the indicator column under which the offer fails most clearly. One column is the load-bearing one a prosecutor would lead with.

Fact about the offer Timing & proximity to decision Value Recipient role
10 calendar days from submission High — —
Award decision the Monday after High — —
~£620 per recipient (2.5x policy threshold) — Mid —
Recipient is the buyer scoring the bid — — High
No prior relationship between Joe and Diana Mid — Mid
Portrait of Iona Whitfield, CFO
⚖ Decision Point 2 of 3

Iona walks in before the 4pm slot. "Joe says you killed the rugby thing. Linsel is a £2.8M bid we don't win. You've ruled out the move our competitor will make. I'm not asking you to send the tickets. I'm asking what we do instead, and whether 'a working lunch with engineers' closes a procurement director who's never met us."

How do you respond?

Your choice

Hold the line on hospitality. Compete on the bid.

Working lunch is the bridge. Proposal closes the bid. Tighter technical narrative and a half-day site visit at the test rig the week after submission, on the books. If Calthorpe wins on rugby tickets, that tells us about Diana's procurement. Naomi writes a file note: rugby raised, considered, refused.

Your choice

Restage as a sponsored industry roundtable.

Sponsor a North Sea pressure-testing roundtable. Ten attendees, all three shortlisted suppliers' clients invited, agenda set with an industry body. Diana sits alongside four peers. Naomi pre-clears, sub-£200 a head, no individual gift. But the line between "industry event" and "hospitality aimed at the buyer" thins fast under scrutiny.

Your choice

Find a smaller gesture that stays under the threshold.

Iona has a point. Drop the rugby. Send Diana a £200 conference ticket, an industry book, a note from Joe. Under £250. Log it on the way out. Looks proportionate on the register. Reads to Diana the same way the £620 ticket did, just smaller.

Portrait of Iona Whitfield, CFO
Wednesday, 4:05 PM · Iona's office +3
Sam Holt

No tickets, no roundtable, no gift. The proposal closes the bid. Tighter technical narrative, half-day site visit at the test rig the week after submission, on the books. Naomi files the note today: rugby raised, considered, refused, with reasons.

Iona Whitfield

If we lose and Calthorpe took her to the rugby, you know what I'll hear in the post-mortem.

Sam Holt

If we lose because Diana scored a hosted box over a £2.8M technical proposal, that's a procurement we never held. The cost of finding out is ten days. The cost of not finding out is on a register the SFO can subpoena.

Iona Whitfield

Naomi, file the note. Sam, technical draft tonight.

Why This Held Up

Holding the line under commercial pressure is the test of MoJ Principle 5: staff only believe the procedures are real when senior people apply them in front of senior money. Naomi's file note is the documented near-miss Section 7 expects. The site visit is the on-the-books engagement SFO hospitality guidance contemplates: tied to the technical case, agenda shared, no asymmetric advantage.

Portrait of Naomi Aldridge
Thursday, 10:15 AM · Naomi's office +1
Sam Holt

Sponsored North Sea pressure-testing roundtable, four weeks out. Ten attendees, all three shortlisted suppliers' clients invited, agenda with the BPMA. Sub-£200 a head. No individual gift. Diana sits next to four peers.

Naomi Aldridge

I can pre-clear. Two conditions. Agenda technical, visible to all three bidders before the bid closes. Invite list not tilted toward Linsel.

Naomi Aldridge

One more. If the SFO reads the invite list, the question they'll ask is whether the event existed before the bid did. Make sure the BPMA's emails predate the bid window.

Where The Compromise Holds, And Where It Doesn't

MoJ Principle 1 requires procedures proportionate to risk. A genuine industry event with an external organising body, agenda visible to all bidders, no asymmetric advantage, sits inside the lane SFO hospitality guidance contemplates. But timing matters. An event invented inside the bid window, paid for by Meridian, with the buyer at the centre, reads as marketing dressed as networking. The pre-clear note has to capture why Naomi was satisfied it's the first kind.

Wednesday, 4:30 PM −1
Sam Holt

Drop the rugby. Single £200 conference ticket, industry book, hand-written note from Joe. Under the threshold. Log it on the way out.

Iona Whitfield

Sensible. Proportionate.

Narrator

The package goes out Thursday. Diana's PA logs the conference ticket and the book in Linsel's incoming-hospitality register the same morning. Diana doesn't decline, doesn't accept, doesn't acknowledge. The bid lands the following Friday. Whoever scores it has now seen Meridian's name on the buyer-side register the week before they read the proposal.

Below The Threshold Is Not Below The Test

Pre-approval thresholds are a procedural backstop, not the legal test. The Section 1 test asks whether the advantage was given intending to induce improper performance, and the SFO hospitality guidance reads value alongside timing and recipient role. A £200 conference ticket aimed personally at the buyer, sent by the bidder during the bid window, hits the timing axis whether or not it clears the £250 hurdle. MoJ Principle 1 expects judgement, not threshold-shopping.

Friday, 9:55 AM · bid room, two days before submission
Narrator

Aaron knocks before stepping in. He has a single sheet of A4 with him.

Aaron Whitlock

Sam, before the bid goes Friday. I went back through Joe's expense reports for the Linsel pre-bid period. Two dinners with Diana's procurement analyst at restaurants Joe didn't pre-clear. Both under £250. Both inside the bid window. Neither on the giving-side register.

Aaron Whitlock

I'm not raising this to get Joe in trouble. I'm raising it because the proposal goes out Friday and I'm putting my name on the cover page as the BD lead under your sign-off. I want to know we're not going to have a problem the day after the award.

Narrator

Aaron is doing the M1 Joe-Harding move on you, the right way round. The bid is two days from going out. The procedural question is what happens before submission so the bid stands up to retrospective review.

Activity · Pre-submission ethics checklist

Six statements about the Linsel bid as it stands today. Check the ones you believe are true or defensible. Leave the rest blank. Wrong ticks and wrong blanks both lose points.

Checked = you think the statement is true / defensible. Unchecked = you think it's false / overreach.

Portrait of Naomi Aldridge, Compliance Manager
⚖ Decision Point 3 of 3

Bid goes out Friday. Linsel near-miss is on the file. Joe's eighteen-month register gap is on Iona's desk Monday. She wants a joint BD-and-Compliance paper, not a Compliance edict. What does it say about giving-side hospitality?

What do you put in place?

Your choice

A BD-side pre-clear flow, retrospective audit of Joe's prior bids, and quarterly board reporting on giving-side hospitality.

Mirror Module 1: 90-second pre-clear form for anything above £250 to a customer, 24-hour Naomi SLA, automatic block during a live tender. Retrospective audit of Joe's last 24 months to scope Section 7 exposure. Quarterly aggregate board reporting. Annual joint BD/Compliance training.

Your choice

Drop the giving-side threshold during tenders and send a company-wide reminder.

Drop the threshold from £250 to £100 in active tenders, reminder to all BD staff, cover it at the next sales kick-off. Proportionate. No new system. No retrospective audit.

Your choice

File the incident note. The policy already covers it.

The procedure exists. Naomi has the note. Tickets never went. Bid went out clean. An incident note for next year's audit is enough. Anything more risks turning a clean win into a witch hunt.

Portrait of Iona Whitfield, CFO
Following Monday, 9:00 AM · Iona's office +3
Iona Whitfield

Walk me through it.

Sam Holt

Three pieces. BD-side pre-clear: 90-second form, anything over £250 to a prospect, 24-hour Naomi SLA, automatic block during a live tender. Retrospective audit on Joe's last 24 months. Quarterly aggregate board reporting alongside revenue.

Iona Whitfield

The audit is the part the board will fight. If it finds something, every bid manager will think they're next.

Sam Holt

If it finds something, the SFO finds it twice as fast at twice the cost. Volunteering the look is the cheapest version of finding out. Section 7 doesn't ask if we knew, it asks if we had adequate procedures. An audit is what those look like in motion.

The Three Pillars On The Giving Side

Principle 1 (Proportionate): a 90-second form sized to BD's workflow, with automatic blocks during tender windows. Principle 4 (Due Diligence): retrospective audit of prior BD activity applies due diligence to the company's own salesforce, not just suppliers. Principle 6 (Monitoring): quarterly board reporting makes the system self-correcting and visible to non-executives, which is what the SFO expects.

Friday, 2:00 PM +1
Sam Holt

Giving-side threshold drops to £100 during active tenders. Reminder out Monday. Naomi and I cover it at the next sales kick-off.

Iona Whitfield

Sensible. Not heavy-handed.

Narrator

The email goes out Monday. Open rate is 68%. By Friday it's been forgotten. Six months later a different bid lead at Meridian sends two £90 dinners to the same procurement analyst on a different account. Each event is below threshold. The pattern is the one Aaron flagged about Joe, with a different name on the file.

Communication Is Not A System

MoJ Principle 5 separates communication (telling people the policy exists) from training and procedural enforcement (making sure they apply it under pressure). An email and a kick-off slide are the first. A pre-clear form with hard blocks and a retrospective audit are the second. Without the audit, prior bids stay in the file unexamined, and the Section 7 defence on those contracts depends on procedures the company has now noticed weren't being followed.

Eighteen months later −2
Sam Holt

I've drafted the file note. Procedure is there, Naomi has the audit trail. We don't need to make it heavier than the situation needed.

Iona Whitfield

Fair. These things happen.

Narrator

The note goes on the file. Joe's eighteen-month register gap is never audited. Meridian wins Linsel. Two years later, Calthorpe loses a different competitive bid in the same sector and asks its lawyers to look at how Meridian wins what Meridian wins. The lawyers find five contracts where the BD lead was Joe and the giving-side register has no entries from the bid window. They write to the SFO. The SFO's first request to Meridian is for the giving-side hospitality register covering the relevant tender periods.

Individual Note Versus Systemic Fix

Section 7 places the duty on the company, not the individual. The defence asks whether Meridian's procedures were adequate to prevent the conduct, applied to every bid the company ran. A single file note on a near-miss does no monitoring, no training, and no procedural improvement. MoJ Principle 6 requires the company to review and update procedures in light of experience. Meridian had the experience. Nothing was reviewed.

Six months on

Where the Linsel bid sits

The bid went out without rugby tickets. Whether Meridian won or lost the account matters less than what now sits on the file about how Meridian sells. What happens between Sam, Joe and the next prospect depends on what Sam put in place.

Module complete. Take the knowledge check when you're ready. Take the Module Quiz →
Your Result
/ 17

Your Decisions

What to take into the next bid

1. A line for the bid room. "Tickets don't go this side of the award. £620 a head, ten days from submission, hits both s.1 indicators. We bridge through a working lunch on the books, agenda Naomi has signed." Value, timing, threshold, route.
2. Below the threshold is not below the test. The s.1 question is intent and proximity, not whether you cleared a number. Pre-clear value plus timing plus recipient role together.
3. A register gap on a senior bid manager isn't hygiene. Eighteen months with no giving-side entry is a flag. Retrospective audit is what Section 7 expects once the gap is visible.
4. "Calthorpe will" isn't a defence. The bar is what your company stands behind in a regulator's office, not what the competitor will do.

Key Legal References

Section 1

Bribing another person

SFO Guidance

Hospitality approach

Section 7

Failure to prevent

PIDA 1998

Whistleblower protection

MoJ Principle 4

Due diligence

MoJ Principle 6

Monitoring & review

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Course Complete · Module 2 of 2

That's the course.

Two modules, two angles. Module 1: hospitality coming at you. Module 2: hospitality going out. The s.1 test is the same in both directions: value, timing, recipient role. Take the quiz above to record completion and download your certificate.