Introduction

This is “What Just Happened?,” the podcast that looks at the biggest brand crises of our time, what they meant for organisational strategy and behaviour, and their lasting impact on our approach to crisis communication.

I’m Kate Hartley. And I’m Tamara Littleton. And together, we’ll delve into what happened, why it mattered, and whether it could happen again.

Episode 

Tamara Littleton: We’re taking a different approach for this episode. Kate, would you like to share what we are talking about today?

Kate Hartley: I can’t wait to get into this one. We’re going to talk about one of the biggest whistleblowing cases we’ve ever seen, which I think will undoubtedly set the benchmark for how whistleblowers are treated in the future. And this took place over more than a decade. It involves Interpol, the SEC, the state of Monaco, national prosecutors in Brazil, the USA, the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and the UK. They completely shook the international oil and gas industry and even brought down a government. It also, sadly, very nearly destroyed the life of the whistleblower involved.

So today, we’re going to talk about Jonathan Taylor versus SBM Offshore.

TL: We’re incredibly lucky because we’re going to be talking to the whistleblower himself today to dig into this extraordinary story. Before we do, though, can you give us a summary of what happened?

KH: This is an absolutely massive story, but the very short summary is that in 2012, Jonathan Taylor, who was a lawyer for SBM Offshore, exposed his employer as paying the biggest bribe that we’ve ever seen or ever known of in the international oil and gas industry. It was around 240 million US dollars, and that was paid to governments and oil companies in order to secure contracts.

TL: For any of us who hadn’t heard of SBM Offshore, what can you tell us about them, just to give us some context?

KH: I imagine most people won’t have heard of SBM. It’s a Dutch company headquartered in Amsterdam. It used to have its main office in Monaco, and it makes floating platforms that are used in the world of offshore energy. So it basically enables access to otherwise inaccessible oil and gas reserves beneath the deep seabed.

Now, it’s a huge company. It turns over about four and a half billion dollars, but as you said, most people will not know who it is at all.

SBM was found guilty of bribery and was ordered to pay 827 million US dollars in fines, which was a lot more than the original bribes. Two of the company’s former CEOs were prosecuted, fined, and given jail sentences.

TL: And you also mentioned that little, small fact at the start of this—that it involved the downfall of a government. So what happened there?

KH: There’s such a long list of things it involved, isn’t there? That was almost at the end of it. But basically, a director at Petrobras, which is the Brazilian national oil company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, admitted to receiving $22 million from SBM.

This director had already confessed to bribing around 40 people, including members of the Brazilian government. The then CEO of Petrobras resigned over the scandal, which, in turn, contributed to the downfall of the Brazilian government in 2016.

But, of course, the scandal we’re really talking about here is SBM itself. And, fairly obviously, I suppose, SBM really didn’t like the fact that Taylor exposed its bribery, so it went on the attack.

It falsely claimed that he had tried to blackmail the company. They attempted to extradite him to Monaco to see the investigating judge there. Taylor was fighting this for two years, and then the government of Monaco arranged for an Interpol Red Notice to be issued against him.

This is basically a request for law enforcement worldwide to locate someone, arrest them, and extradite them. Now, Jonathan didn’t know about the Red Notice. He wasn’t told about it, and he was arrested while on a family holiday in Croatia, where he was held under house arrest for a year.

During that time, as you can imagine, his whole life was completely turned upside down. He couldn’t work, he couldn’t come home, and he couldn’t make any decisions about his own future while he was fighting the extradition request.

The UK Foreign Office got involved, and the UK Government said he should be protected as a whistleblower. It wasn’t until a year later that he was able to return home, when the Croatian Justice Minister overturned the decision of the Croatian Supreme Court to extradite him.

TL: You know I have to ask—where are we now? Where is Jonathan?

KH: Well, Jonathan is back home in the UK now, but the story only really partially resolved itself last year.

SBM’s attacks on Taylor didn’t stop throughout that whole period, and in 2022, a judge in Monaco ruled that Taylor had no case to answer in response to SBM’s claims of attempted extortion. So, there was literally no case at all—it should never have been brought against him.

He sued SBM Offshore, and he partially won his case against them in the Netherlands in 2024. However, that decision is now being appealed to the Dutch appeal court.

TL: Honestly, this is such an incredible story, and I think it’s time that we get the man himself to join us. I’m really looking forward to getting into the details of this, so we’ll be right back after this short break.

Break

KH: I’m really, really happy to have Jonathan Taylor with us today, the person at the centre of this appalling, appalling story.

John, you and I go back a long way. We first met, I think, when we were 16 at school. And I knew then, as I know now, that you have absolutely extraordinary resilience. To have gone through something like this—how did you manage to come back from it? And how are things now?

Jonathan Taylor: I think the question assumes I have come back from it. In fairness, I haven’t.

Life changed enormously when I got on that flight to Croatia just before the Red Notice was issued against me, and that was a defining moment of my life. It was sort of pre-30th July 2020 and post-30th July 2020.

So, yeah, I can’t reinvent or undo the divorce that followed, and I can’t undo the end of my career. I haven’t yet got back to anywhere near the point I was before I boarded that fateful flight.

It’s been four and a half years now. But no, my life has been turned inside out and upside down—entirely unrecognisable from where it was. So I’m not sure I have come back from it yet.

KH: It really is the most extraordinary story.

One of the things I wanted to ask you about is how, if you were advising an organisation going through the process of change—the kind of change that SBM should have gone through when this happened—what would you say?

If a company has done something really awful, like bribing governments, and has been caught and exposed for doing that, our advice as crisis professionals would be to throw the doors open, work with the whistleblower—in this case, work with you—and use this as a real opportunity to change the culture and how things are done at the organisation.

SBM did pretty much the opposite.

I’m really fascinated to know why they kept going after you. As you just said, it obviously took a horrific toll on your life. But from their point of view, all that did was prolong the scandal for them.

Why on earth would they have done that? They were found guilty way back when this first happened.

Can you talk a bit about how they responded and why you think they responded in that way?

JT: To quote their words in a defamation lawsuit—more commonly known as a SLAPP, a strategic lawsuit against public participation, which oligarchs typically use to silence people who can’t afford to defend themselves, often in a foreign court—to quote what they wrote in there, I “brought the company to its knees,” and there was a lot of personal resentment against me for that at the most senior level of the company. That resentment has continued, even now.

The former CEO still won’t shake my hand when we meet in court. It’s extremely personal. Had the company been able to cut through that, yeah, I’m sure they would have probably done away with me, settled with me, and moved on. But that is not something they will be doing.

I’m currently suing them for defamation in the Dutch courts, and their lawyers openly said in court, “This will go to the European Court of Human Rights if need be. We would plead it all the way.”

So, on one hand, it was a personal vendetta against me. On the other hand, it was really poor advice. They voluntarily went to the Dutch prosecutor and the American prosecutor. To quote an FBI agent, the external US lawyers misled the Department of Justice to the point where it closed the investigation, saying they didn’t have jurisdiction—until I made sure they reopened it and ensured it was handled by the Dutch.

What they were doing was telling as little as they possibly could to those two prosecutors, being very selective as to whom they chose, and it all backfired.

What they should have done was enter into a multi-party agreement with all the relevant prosecutors, including countries like Brazil—where pretty much half the bribes up to 2012 were paid—and they should have included all relevant parties in one fell swoop. That way, they could have avoided what has inevitably happened: they are getting fined year in, year out, on an indefinite basis because they didn’t approach everyone.

Instead, parties kept coming to them—or at least were going to them—and had they dealt with everything in one go, it would have been resolved. But they kept key information, the main part of the picture, away from prosecutors, showing them only a little and thinking they could get away with it.

The very approach they adopted, which was termed “containment” by the Chief Governance and Compliance Officer brought in at board level—a former Allen & Overy man—completely failed and backfired, costing the company far more than it ever should have for its impaired parties.

KH: I’m really interested that you said that was bad advice. This really intrigues me because there’s a new CEO there now, isn’t there?

JT: Yes, he’s the new CEO—but I mean, he predates me. He joined at the beginning of the century. But he’s a new individual, someone who could have stamped his authority on the situation.

He wasn’t involved in any way, shape, or form in all of the corruption. He had the opportunity to say, “Settle with Taylor and move on.” But he was on the board as Chief Operations Officer for about a year before he took over as CEO, and he would have been heavily influenced by Bruno Chabas, the CEO throughout the cover-up period.

He has been with SBM throughout all of this century. So while he had the opportunity to take a different path, he chose not to.

We wrote to congratulate him on his appointment. We had always got on well—he used to make a beeline to the legal department in Monaco after returning from Canada, where he was a shore-based manager. But no, he’s toed the line and decided to continue to fight Taylor.

KH: I find that really extraordinary because that was an opportunity, as you say, to change how the company operates, perhaps even to work with you to prevent this kind of behaviour in the first place. I’m sure we’ll talk more about that in a moment.

TL: John, if I could just jump in—firstly, we’re so appreciative that you’ve come on to talk about this. I know that you’re now advocating for whistleblowers.

What are the big lessons here for whistleblowers? If someone discovers their company is doing something wrong, how would you advise them to blow the whistle, based on your own experience?

JT: First and foremost, if it’s a prudent, well-run company, it will have a compliance discipline or department— a robust part of the company where so-called whistleblowers can go, so the issue at hand can be dealt with internally and there’s no need to go to the authorities.

Had that been the case with me, when I came across this information, I could have just walked into the relevant compliance department’s offices, plonked it down, and walked away, getting on with my job.

The biggest message, really, is the importance of a robust compliance department within corporations, to prevent situations like this. The department must be trusted, and people should feel comfortable going to it. This is more critical than ever now. Whistleblowing has become mainstream, and it’s imperative that companies have the right tools to handle whistleblowers—who are, after all, just highlighting corruption or other misdeeds that should not be happening in the first place.

Unfortunately, there was no compliance department. Initially, I just wanted to report what I had found to a third party to cover my own back. It wasn’t some altruistic deed I felt obliged to carry out—I just wanted to ensure I couldn’t later be associated with these heinous crimes by failing to act.

So, I went to the SEC very quietly and anonymously through a US attorney and provided them with an awful amount of information.

The SEC regulates the US stock exchange, and while SBM is listed on the Dutch stock exchange, it did trade American Depository Receipts, so it could have come under the SEC’s jurisdiction. But the SEC decided it didn’t have jurisdiction and told me—without knowing my name—to go to the Department of Justice.

At the time, the Department of Justice didn’t really have an appetite for it. The seeds of the cover-up were already being witnessed—the green shoots of those seeds. But I thought, “At least give them a chance; maybe they’ll change their minds.” I didn’t want to go straight to the prosecuting authorities.

One of the main recipients of SBM’s bribes was, of course, Brazil’s national oil and gas company, Petrobras. At its peak, it was the biggest company in the southern hemisphere by market capitalisation. The SEC had access to the evidence I provided regarding the recipients of the bribes, yet they chose to do nothing.

The scandal ultimately wiped over $200 billion off Petrobras’ share value—far more than, for example, what people lost in the Madoff case.

An act was passed in the US called the Dodd-Frank Act, which was designed to encourage whistleblowers by offering financial incentives. I didn’t qualify for that, but the whole point of the act was to encourage people to come forward with information for the SEC to act on.

One of the most surprising aspects of this entire tale of woe is that the SEC did absolutely nothing regarding Petrobras.

As for how whistleblowers should act in the future—yes, anonymity is essential.

Unfortunately, I was trying to put SBM behind me after I left. Five months after everything blew up, I had had no contact with them and no intention of being in touch. But nine months later, the Chief Governance and Compliance Officer reached out to me, setting off a whole chain of events.

He accused me of breaching the confidentiality provisions of the mutual termination agreement I had signed when I left. That ultimately led to a whole series of events that caused me to blow the whistle more publicly—on Wikipedia. That’s when things really escalated.

Had I never received that email, I probably would have just stayed in the background. I had done what I needed to do. But that email ended up costing the company almost a billion dollars and resulted in multiple imprisonments.

TL: And so, I suppose this is a more personal question, and possibly a difficult one to answer: if you could go back 10 years, would you have done anything differently? Or would you still have blown the whistle in the first place?

JT: With the benefit of hindsight, I would not have reacted to that condescending email I received on 13th March 2013. I should have done nothing.

I had marked the cards of the SEC, so they either would have taken action or they wouldn’t. They weren’t going to pursue the matter. With hindsight, I would have done nothing more. Given the position I’m in now, I would be mad not to say that.

KH: And John, just so I’m clear—that’s because you had done what was your duty in terms of reporting? So therefore, you wouldn’t have been convicted had it been uncovered?

JT: I wouldn’t have had my collar felt years down the line. I’d like to think that, if I had, I could say, “Well, actually, I told the authorities about all these heinous crimes. I did my bit.” The regulator, in this case, chose not to act on it, but I had told them everything I knew and everything I had discovered.

I didn’t want to be associated with these crimes or the cover-up of them.

TL: I want to go back to what you said earlier about company culture and the need for these sorts of systems to be in place.

As you said, in an ideal world, a company wouldn’t need whistleblowers because they wouldn’t be doing anything wrong in the first place—or at the very least, any wrongdoing would be caught early and addressed through internal processes.

So, what can we learn about culture? How do you create a culture where people are listened to and where any unlawful activity is quickly stopped? Was a big part of the issue the company’s culture?

JT: I like to think SBM was an extreme case.

Their corruption dates back almost to when they were founded by an Egyptian man called Mr Mari, when the company was headquartered in landlocked Switzerland—a country that, at the time, allowed the payment of bribes and even made them tax-deductible. The company never really grew up and continued those practices.

When it moved its main offices to Monaco, it just carried on as before. I think it’s an extreme example because the corruption was top-down.

Many of the agreements under which bribes were paid were actually signed by board members. To be a salesman at SBM meant, by default, you were a briber—because that was how they won the majority of their business. And, quite simply, there were people in accounts who pressed the right buttons to ensure the money was paid.

Bribery was embedded in the fabric of the company’s DNA. It was central to its business practices, so there was never much hope of reform.

They were never going to have a strong, robust compliance department. But, yes, for a modern, professionally run company, it is absolutely essential that employees have trust and faith in the compliance department—often comprising neutral parties, not necessarily company employees—so that they can report wrongdoing with confidence that they will be taken seriously.

This is fundamental to my whole story. People shouldn’t have to go to the SEC.

Now, the Serious Fraud Office wants to introduce some sort of award scheme for whistleblowers. But that shouldn’t be necessary. Employees should be able to report wrongdoing within the company, knowing they will be heard and action will be taken.

For any organisation that takes anti-bribery and compliance seriously, it is essential to have a good compliance department—so that whistleblowers like me never have to exist.

If companies dealt with these matters internally, there would be no headlines, no billion-dollar fines, no prison sentences—because the company would be handling the matter properly from the outset.

KH: Such an incredibly important point.

I’m really struck by what you said—that corruption was embedded in the company from its very foundation. It’s very easy for organisations to have a culture so ingrained that they never question it.

They never question what is right. And yet, we must constantly question what is right, don’t we? That’s the only way to stop these kinds of historic practices from becoming so entrenched that they lead to disasters like this.

JT: Exactly.

I’m living, breathing evidence of what happens when a company’s culture is so blind to improper practices that it allows them to continue simply because they boost the balance sheet.

For any companies still operating in such a dinosaur-like fashion, I’m not sure how much longer they will survive.

Nowadays, when businesses bid for contracts, clients want to know about their compliance history. They want to know how robust the company’s compliance department is and how often its hotlines are used to report corruption.

Compliance has now become a key issue.

There’s currently a bill going through Parliament—whether it will work or not, I don’t know—proposing the creation of a government-led “Office of the Whistleblower.”

Companies can no longer afford to ignore compliance. They can’t cling to outdated practices. That is the serious and essential message I am trying to put out there.

KH: I hope they come and talk to you before they finalise anything!

John, what’s next for you?

JT: That’s a very good question.

I give the occasional speech—people are interested in hearing the story, which has many, many chapters.

I’m always looking for opportunities to collaborate with other organisations in the area of compliance because, unfortunately, I’ve now become quite an authority on it.

I also work with two charities on their councils, so I’m very much still involved in the world of compliance—looking at how I can help, advise, and consult.

KH: We’re incredibly grateful to you for coming to talk to us.

It’s an absolutely extraordinary story. It’s clearly taken a huge toll on you, but I think you are incredible for coming through it and for the work you’re doing now.

John, thank you very much.

JT: You’re most welcome.

Outro

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