Within the scope of our Anti-Bribery and Anti- Corruption Policy, which forms an integral part of our Bank’s legislation, we aim to comply with ethical principles and international standards in addition to the legal legislation valid in all countries where we operate. We adopt a zero-tolerance policy in this regard. Our Board of Directors’ responsibility is to approve, implement, and update our Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption Policy, including managers, our subsidiaries and affiliates and their employees; companies, business partners, and their employees which we receive external services.
Our employees are obliged to directly report the persons and institutions that act against the policy rules or any situation that violates these rules to the Audit Board. In order to ensure that the employee making the report is not harmed, we keep all notifications confidential and terminate our work with institutions that act against our Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption Policy. Our employees can easily access our Audit Board’s Reporting Page and e-mail addresses that we use for reporting.
As part of the fight against corruption, we offer 26 e-learning trainings to our employees. Our employees participated in these trainings, which we held online for a total of 56,266 hours in 2021, 129,359 times in total. We also provided 765 hours of in-class training on Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption.
In the event that the anti-bribery policy is violated in various ways, we impose sanctions under the Personnel Regulation and the 25th Term Collective Labor Agreement. In cases against the policy, our Audit Board investigates the issue, and necessary sanctions are applied following the legislation to detect behaviors that do not comply with the legislation. In case of violation of the Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption Policy, disciplinary penalties that may lead to the termination of the employment contract, depending on the nature of the incident, come to the fore. Additionally, there may be criminal liability for those who do not comply with the relevant legislation. In addition, a penalty may be imposed to those, who do not comply with the relevant legislation.
Within the scope of the evaluation of the Anti-Bribery Policy and/or systems, we obtain opinions from all department managers through a survey method to assess the operational risk through the risk assessment studies conducted annually by the Board of Inspectors. In Banking Process Audits and Assessment of Internal Control System activities, we also grade audit centers’ internal control environments. We present all our work to the Audit Committee and the Board of Directors in the Audit Board’s Annual Report. Additionally, we assess and report corruption-related risks in terms of business lines, risk causes, and risk types by analyzing and grouping other risks with the number of incidents and risk amount.
You can access our Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption Policy on our website at https://www.vakifbank.com.tr/Default.aspx?pageID=2783