ABB is not some dusty engineering outfit flogging bolts out of a lock-up. It is a global electrification and automation giant with a corporate history long enough to need a forklift and a corruption record rancid enough to make the compliance department sleep with the fucking lights on. Michael Page’s own case study says Page helped ABB examine salaries, benefits, candidate supply and gender split across production, engineering, finance, quality and procurement roles. Lovely. Because when a company with bribery baggage this filthy starts buying people-data polish from Page, TCAP has one question: is this fair workforce planning, or just another corporate corpse being measured for a cleaner suit?
Welcome Back To The Page Partner Morgue
Page Partners exists for this exact kind of corporate fuckery.
Not because every Page customer is automatically guilty of what Page did in my case. That would be lazy, and TCAP does not need lazy. The material is already disgusting enough without dragging a bin bag of invented bollocks into the room.
The point is sharper. Page sells judgement. Page sells labour-market intelligence. Page sells candidate insight. Page sells professional credibility to companies that want their hiring, pay, recruitment and workforce decisions to look clean, rational and defensible.
So when Page’s own conduct in my case raises questions about complaint handling, redactions, disability discrimination, joinder, ET3 silence and attempted escape, the clients who let Page near their people machinery become legitimate public-interest targets.
ABB is one of them.
And ABB comes with baggage so heavy it should have hazard lights, a warning siren and a bastard escort vehicle.
The Page Connection
Michael Page does not whisper the ABB link. It publishes it.
In its ABB HR Advisory case study, Michael Page describes ABB as a 130-year-old manufacturing firm and a technology leader in electrification and automation, with 105,000 employees. Page says ABB wanted external insight into salary and benefits across roles in production, engineering, finance, quality and procurement. It also says ABB wanted to ensure teams were remunerated fairly and equitably, and in line with competitors.
That is the polite version.
The useful version is this: ABB brought Page into the guts of its people machinery. Salaries. Benefits. Candidate availability. Gender split. Ease of recruitment. Market positioning. The pipes beneath the polished career page. The bit where the shit actually moves before the annual report sprays the room with innovation perfume.
Page says its People and Data Intelligence team benchmarked roles, produced salary ranges, reviewed bonus, pension and holiday entitlement, examined average time to hire and looked at candidate supply by location, including gender split.
So no, this was not some recruiter lobbing CVs into an inbox while chewing a pen and lying on LinkedIn.
This was Page with its hands in the people-data drawer.
And that matters, because ABB is not just any client. ABB is a company that has paid hundreds of millions over bribery and corruption cases.
So when Page is helping ABB make its workforce maths look fair, someone should probably check whether the fucking calculator is sticky.
ABB And The Eskom Bribery Corpse
Let’s talk about the big one.
In December 2022, the United States Department of Justice announced that ABB had agreed to pay more than $315 million to resolve a coordinated global foreign bribery case. The case involved South Africa’s state-owned energy company, Eskom. ABB subsidiaries in Switzerland and South Africa pleaded guilty to bribery conspiracy.
That is not a parking ticket. That is not an admin wobble. That is not some tiny compliance fart after a bad lunch.
That is the corporate equivalent of opening the switchgear cabinet and finding a skeleton inside wearing a lanyard, clutching a purchase order and grinning through the dust.
According to the DOJ, between 2014 and 2017, ABB, through certain subsidiaries, paid bribes to a high-ranking Eskom employee to obtain business advantages linked to multiple contracts. The DOJ said ABB worked with subcontractors associated with that official despite poor qualifications and lack of experience. In return, ABB received improper advantages, including confidential and internal Eskom information.
There it is. The phrase every compliance department loves finding floating face-down in the pond: confidential internal information.
The DOJ also said ABB conducted sham negotiations to obtain contracts at inflated prices that had been pre-arranged with the official, on the condition that ABB employ a particular subcontractor associated with him. Payments to subcontractors were falsely recorded as legitimate business expenses, when a portion was intended as bribes.
That is not electrification.
That is not automation.
That is not corporate excellence.
That is a fucking meat grinder for public trust, dressed up as procurement.
Turn public infrastructure into private advantage. Stuff the bribe through a subcontractor. File the paperwork. Wash the hands. Smile for the ethics training. Repeat until the corpse starts leaking through the carpet.
The Same Old Rot, Rewired
The Eskom case was not ABB’s first stroll through the corruption graveyard.
In 2010, the SEC charged ABB with FCPA violations involving bribery schemes in Mexico and Iraq. The SEC said ABB subsidiaries paid bribes to Mexican officials to obtain business with government-owned power companies, and paid kickbacks to Iraq to obtain contracts under the United Nations Oil-for-Food Programme.
Read that again.
Oil-for-Food.
A humanitarian-relief programme linked to Iraq’s civilian population under sanctions. And there, according to the SEC, were ABB subsidiaries allegedly treating it like an all-you-can-eat buffet for corporate piglets with expense accounts.
The SEC said ABB subsidiaries made at least $2.7 million in illicit payments across the Mexico and Iraq schemes to obtain contracts that generated more than $100 million in revenues for ABB. The Mexico allegations included cash bribes, payments to relatives of officials and even a Mediterranean cruise vacation for officials and their wives.
A Mediterranean cruise.
Because apparently nothing says ‘global technology leader’ like bribery with sea views, sun loungers and a cocktail umbrella sticking out of the corruption.
The corporate corpse had not even cooled before the compliance language started doing what compliance language always does: spraying lemon disinfectant over the bloodstain and calling it governance.
Then Page Arrives With The Clipboard
Fast forward to the Michael Page case study.
ABB wants external market insight. ABB wants salary and benefits benchmarking. ABB wants to know if it is remunerating teams fairly and equitably. ABB wants clarity on market position. Page’s People and Data Intelligence team provides the report.
On paper, that sounds reasonable.
In the Page Partners world, it is a perfect pressure point.
Because Page is not just selling recruitment support here. It is selling legitimacy. It is helping ABB frame decisions around pay, candidate supply and workforce fairness. It is putting numbers around the human side of ABB’s operation.
And that is where the black humour writes itself.
A company with bribery history involving Eskom, Mexico and Iraq asks Page for help checking whether its pay and benefits are fair.
After sham negotiations, bribe-linked subcontractors, confidential information, secret kickbacks and Oil-for-Food filth, someone finally remembered to ask whether the pension benchmark looked equitable.
The moral village burned down, but don’t worry, the benefits report has neat headings.
What a comfort.
What a fucking bedtime story.
Page Partner Protection
This is where the Page Partners thesis kicks the door open.
Page markets clean process. Page markets insight. Page markets professional judgement. Page markets the ability to help serious companies make serious people decisions.
But in my case, Page was joined to Employment Tribunal proceedings because its role in the recruitment chain mattered. Then came the silence, the distancing and, in my view, the attempted bail-out.
That is Page Partner Protection.
Protection for the client relationship. Protection for the commercial chain. Protection for the recruitment brand. Protection through careful quietness when the disabled complainant becomes inconvenient.
Not candidate protection. Not accountability. Not transparency.
Protection for the shiny bit. Protection for the invoice. Protection for the client badge. Protection for the machine.
So when ABB appears in Page’s shop window as a client success story, the question is not just what Page did for ABB.
The question is what kind of companies Page helps launder into respectability.
And when Page’s own conduct is challenged, do its partners get the same fog machine, the same corporate crouch, the same arse-covering silence?
Fair And Equitable, Apparently
The Page case study says ABB wanted to ensure teams were remunerated fairly and equitably.
Fine. Let’s take that phrase outside and shine a torch in its mouth.
Fair and equitable means something. It cannot just mean “please benchmark our salaries so candidates stop telling us we are taking the piss.” It cannot just mean “please tell us what competitors offer so we can calibrate the bait.” It cannot just mean “please give us gender split data so the report looks like it has been baptised in inclusion water.”
If ABB wants to talk fairness, it has to carry the whole word. Not just the clean half. Not just the PowerPoint half. Not just the bit that makes HR look like it found religion after procurement got caught pissing in the font.
Fairness does not live only in pay bands. It lives in systems. It lives in procurement. It lives in who gets access, who gets protected, who gets ignored, who gets heard and who gets buried under process when a complaint lands.
That is why Page matters.
Because Page is not just measuring the labour market. Page is part of the labour market. It sits between people and employers. It handles candidates, data, gaps, histories, complaints, tone, risk and reputation.
And my experience with Page suggests that when a disabled candidate becomes inconvenient, the values can go quiet as fuck.
Quiet like a body in a locked room.
ABB’s Compliance Theatre Meets Page’s People Theatre
There is a special stink when corruption history meets workforce fairness language.
ABB’s public face is sustainability, electrification, automation, resource efficiency and industrial progress. Page’s public face is fair recruitment, market insight, candidate supply and people intelligence.
Put them together and you get the perfect corporate altar: clean energy on top, compliance incense in the middle, and something dead moving under the floorboards.
ABB has had corruption findings and settlements that read like a training manual for how public trust gets minced. Page has a case study helping ABB examine salaries, benefits and candidate supply. TCAP has a live file about Page’s conduct in a discrimination dispute.
That triangle is not abstract. It is the modern corporate bargain.
The scandal company gets a respectable people-data partner. The recruitment partner gets a blue-chip client badge. Everyone gets to say ‘fair’, ‘equitable’, ‘sustainable’ and ‘inclusive’ while hoping nobody checks the drains.
Bad news.
TCAP checks drains.
And this one has teeth marks in the pipework.
The Candidate Supply Problem
The most interesting part of the Page case study is not just salary benchmarking. It is candidate supply.
Page says candidate supply was examined in the locations provided by ABB, including the number of candidates available for each role and the gender split across each.
That is powerful information. It can shape recruitment strategy. It can shape expectations. It can shape who gets targeted, who gets chased, who gets ignored and who gets quietly written off before they even reach the door.
So here is the Page Partners question for ABB.
When Page provides people intelligence, what protections exist for disabled candidates? What happens to candidates with health-related gaps? What happens when someone raises discrimination? What happens when the clean workforce model meets a messy human being with a medical history and the absolute fucking nerve to complain?
Because Page can talk about gender split and market availability all it likes. The real test of a recruitment partner is not whether it can produce a tidy report. It is what it does when the candidate does not fit neatly into the spreadsheet.
That is where the spreadsheet starts looking less like HR intelligence and more like a morgue drawer with formulas.
ABB Should Know Better
ABB should understand systems.
It sells systems. It automates systems. It electrifies systems. It lives in systems.
So ABB does not get to pretend people systems are soft, vague or somebody else’s problem. Pay benchmarking is a system. Recruitment intelligence is a system. Candidate supply analysis is a system. Complaint handling is a system.
And systems either protect people, or they process them.
In the Eskom case, authorities described a system that used subcontractors, sham negotiations, inflated prices and false books to move money through the pipes. In the Page case study, we see a different system: salary data, gender split, market insight, candidate supply, time to hire, benchmarking.
Different machinery.
Same question.
Who benefits when the machine runs?
And who gets fed into the fucking gears?
The Question For ABB
So here it is.
Did ABB ask Page about its handling of disability-related complaints? Did ABB review whether Page’s candidate-side conduct matches the fairness language Page sells to clients? Did ABB know Page was joined to my Employment Tribunal claim?
Did ABB ask why Page’s ET3, in my view, looked more like an attempt to sidestep accountability than a serious account of what happened? Did ABB’s own compliance people, after all that bribery history, ask whether a recruitment and HR advisory partner should be held to the same standard ABB now claims to care about?
Or is Page useful enough to pass through the ethics checkpoint without anyone opening the boot?
Because after Eskom, Mexico, Iraq, Oil-for-Food, sham negotiations, inflated contracts, secret kickbacks and a fucking Mediterranean cruise, ABB does not get to act confused when someone asks whether its partners are clean.
You do not get caught with that many bodies in the compliance freezer and then complain when TCAP asks about the smell.
The Page Partners Verdict
ABB is a perfect Page Partners target because the contrast is obscene.
On one side, Michael Page presents the clean little HR advisory picture: fair remuneration, market insight, candidate supply, gender split, benefits, benchmarking and clarity.
On the other side, ABB’s public record includes bribery resolutions, guilty pleas by subsidiaries, corrupt advantages in South Africa, earlier FCPA allegations involving Mexico and Iraq, and the kind of corporate behaviour that makes the word ‘integrity’ sound like a hostage note written in audit ink.
That is the TCAP sweet spot.
Polished people language laid across a corruption file like a napkin over a corpse.
Page sold the workforce maths.
ABB bought the respectability wrapper.
And now TCAP is asking whether the same Page machine that helped ABB talk about fair and equitable remuneration is the machine that goes quiet when discrimination is no longer a metric, but a complaint.
ABB wanted visibility of candidate supply.
Fine.
Here is some visibility back.
Page Partners sees you.
And this one smells like bribes, benefits benchmarking, dead rats, warm invoices and a compliance team trying to bury the body with a fucking salary survey.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Michael Page – ABB HR Advisory Case Study
- US Department of Justice – ABB Agrees to Pay Over $315 Million to Resolve Coordinated Global Foreign Bribery Case
- SEC – ABB Charged For Bribery Schemes In Mexico And Iraq
- SEC Litigation Release – ABB Ltd, Mexico And Iraq FCPA Case
- SEC Enforcement Actions – FCPA Cases, ABB 2022 South Africa Bribery Scheme
- Page ET3 and joinder material – TCAP case file
- Page recruitment, complaint and disclosure correspondence – TCAP case file