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A man, on business in Moscow, is walking down a street one evening when he passes someone who drops a number of transparent envelopes holding a lot of money.
The businessman picks up one of the envelopes and gives it to the passer-by. Suddenly, the businessman is surrounded by a gang who accuse him of taking some of the money.
Extricating this businessman from this perilous situation depends on how well his company has prepared him for business travel in volatile parts of the world.
This is driven by the company's sense of responsibility for its staff, the increasing amount of business travel and the litigious nature of the workplace. In the UK, the prospect of legislation on corporate manslaughter is making companies fret about their future liabilities. So companies are contracting specialists in risk situations to help them handle the pressures of kidnappings, riots, terrorism, natural disasters and straight-up street muggings that might befall their staff.
Preparation counts
According to one such consultant, Control Risks, there is a check-list of seven basic principles that clients should tick or have in place when sending an employee abroad: assessing the risk, briefing the employee, monitoring events, tracking staff, providing 24-hour support, having a contingency plan in place and being able to prove "a demonstrable duty of care".
Some companies help their travelling staff to monitor events through a series of SMS texts.
Tracking where they are is about consolidating all the travel booking data in one place. "You could have one bank using 66 travel agents around the world," says Hannah Kitt, who runs Control Risk's travel tracker system.
"If something goes wrong, you've got to have all that information at your fingertips."
Any serious incident should trigger a crisis management plan, which will involve a designated group holding a conference call to review the situation and decide on the next steps. Companies, says Kitt, must be able to prove they have a risk-assessment policy in place for business travel.
As for the businessman in Russia, he backed himself into a shop and stood in front of a CCTV camera. He managed to phone the company security hotline, who established where he was and got the company's Moscow office to pick him up and put him in a car. He was saved by his own quick thinking and the advice of a security centre hundreds of miles away.
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