Macmillan Group blacklisted by World Bank over bribes in Sudan education project

The Macmillan Group, one of the world's biggest English-language publishers, has been blacklisted by the World Bank from bidding for any of its contracts for six years after it admitted to making bribery payments to secure a multi-million pound contract of the bank funded education project in southern Sudan.

Founded in 1843 and having published works of authors like W B Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Tennyson to name a few, Macmillan paid bribes to backhanders during a bidding process for a multi-million pound contract of printing textbooks that was funded by aid payments from the World Bank.

The bribes were paid between 2008 and 2009 to a Sudanese public official, but Macmillan did not even win the contract, which eventually was won by an unnamed rival company.

Sudan was ravaged by one of the deadliest wars of the 20th century, where nearly 1.9 million civilians were killed in the southern part of the country making it to be the highest civilian death toll of any war since World War 11.

The conflict officially ended in January 2006 with the signing of a peace agreement.

International donors then pumped in millions of dollars to rehabilitate the country and through worldwide donations, a Multi Donor Trust Fund (MDTF) was set up in 2006 under the auspices of the World Bank.