lesotho: Another watershed for Acres

The bribery case against Acres International Ltd. has been among the more spectacular in recent memory. This landmark legal battle saw the engineering consulting firm convicted on two counts of bribery surrounded allegations that Acres used an agent to bribe the head of a giant water and hydroelectric development in the southern African nation of Lesotho. The court pulled no punches: Acres' "cynical exploitation" of the project, "motivated as it was by greed, is the more reprehensible," Judge Jan Steyn wrote in his judgment. The company's reputation, he predicted, "will be sullied by the conviction and it will live in the shadow of the taint of corruption." But what action will the World Bank, a major funder of the project, and the Canadian government take against the company?