But if you look "up" the amount of corruption rise to the astonishing levels. Just remember Stuttgart 21 or the Berlin Airport, Hamburg Elb Philharmonic, Battleship Gorch Fock. Germany is full of such corrupt projects, it's obvious and everyone knows about it, but nobody yet went to jail because of it.
None of those are examples of corruption, unless you have an almost unlimited understanding of what constitutes corruption.
Fun fact, for a very long time German companies could declare bribes paid abroad in their taxes. Legally. Seems that a lot of people didn't get the memo that bribery was, indeed, illegal now.
Surprisingly realistic policy, considering that bribery is simply part of everyday business in some locales.
I dont think there is any amount of money i could offer to safely escape a drunk driving ticket, however the ceo of my company was the head of the board for an security company, and we were forced to use their products despite an unimaginable amount of flaws.
The second the security company was sold we were allowed to drop every aspect of that company, 10 huge enterprise products, and the entire IT and Security organizations both agreed that throwing out the whole years roadmap and working to switch vendors as soon as possible was the best use of our time.
Thats a small example of pure and utter -yet legal- corruption. There is no world in which that vendor was the right choice for a single product let alone 10. Except the world where the CEO could make the productivity of one company fungible with the revenue of another.
If a guy owns a company, I don't doubt that he believes it's the best at what they do. The one thing most CEOs I've met have in common is they ridiculously overestimate how great their companies are. This guy probably genuinely believed his security company was the best choice. It's "not invented here" on the scale of companies instead of git repos.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-buy-new-york-citys-get-out-of-...
A classic problem parties have is that they need to take care of their party militants and their families. This typically creates economic activities (insurance, banks, investment funds, charities, community organizations, ..) that are aligned on party lines.
These companies are part of the party infrastructure and are used as power-bases to influence the party as well.
It's called patronage and is rampant in western democracies.
Sadly (luckily?) this wasn't corruption but plain out retarded levels of incompetence...
It’s like Putin - you could call him a democratic asshole, but you would never call him incompetent in politics - because if he was, he wouldn’t be alive by now.
Is this an idiom wherewith I'm unfamiliar?
The client was constantly allowed to adjust plans.
I've worked as architect on similar sized projects. You can't allow clients and esp. committees to change direction at all. This a breach of contract. With hospitals, universities, concert halls and airports you need to be strict to the local government, which is the client in such cases. They are no experts, they change every 4 years, they exhibit irrational behavior sitting in a committee.