Five hundred dollars. That is what the harbourmaster is demanding to allow the ship into port.

The ship’s captain telephones head office. Can he pay? No, bribery is against the law. The harbourmaster lowers his demand to $50. The captain refuses. Days later the ship is allowed to dock, bribe unpaid. The delay costs the ship’s company $2m.

A second dilemma. A building inspector threatens to close your factory unless you have a risk assessment done by an outside consultant, who is the building inspector’s brother-in-law.

These were situations I heard discussed at a conference on corruption last week at London’s Chatham House. At the conference were business leaders, anti-corruption campaigners, lawyers and academics from around the world.

Their message was depressing. In spite of anti-bribery laws, corruption was everywhere, although it was changing. “The corruption gene is mutating,” one speaker said. It was no longer possible to walk into a UK bank with a suitcase of cash and open an account, but there were new forms of graft. For example, traffickers of girls were creating a web of corruption, just as heroin smugglers had.

It was no surprise, a Russian delegate said, that the Sochi Winter Olympics had been plagued by corruption allegations. Russia was corrupt before the games and would be corrupt after. To expect the event itself to be different was like expecting an alcoholic to stay sober at a vodka festival.

It was not just poorer and developing countries that were to blame. Companies’ webs of tax avoidance were evidence of corruption in rich countries, said Angel Gurría, secretary-general of the OECD, which groups those rich countries. (Although the conference took place under the Chatham House Rule, which means speakers and participants should not be identified, Mr Gurría spoke on the record.)

Although the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention dates back to 1997, half of the 40 countries, OECD members and others, that signed up to it have not prosecuted anyone.

The latest assessment by Transparency International, the anti-corruption campaign organisation, lists 20 countries, accounting for 26.9 per cent of world exports, that have done little or nothing to enforce their anti-corruption laws. They include Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, Israel and Brazil.

Only four countries - Switzerland, Germany, the UK and the US - are credited with ‘active enforcement’ of anti-corruption laws and the last two came in for considerable criticism at the conference.

The UK had to be ‘dragged kicking and screaming, into passing its Bribery Act, delegates said, and the US still allowed ‘facilitation payments’ under its pioneering Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

What should be done about facilitation payments and the kind of demands at the beginning of this column? The aim, speakers said, was to be in a situation where no one asked for them, where you and your local managers got to know officials and made it clear that you had an anti-bribery policy.

Things wouldn’t change overnight, the conference heard. Too many people benefited from corruption.

Was there any optimism? Yes, ordinary people are fighting corruption. It was a central feature of opposition campaigns in Ukraine and India.

There were Russian drivers who had video cameras on their dashboards so they could challenge corrupt officials who stopped them and contest bogus insurance claims.

There was ipaidabribe.com, an Indian website, where people record their own experiences - such as someone who went to a police station as part of the passport renewal process and was persuaded to pay a ‘fee’.

“Feeling sick that I chickened out . . . I am not an influential person who has the back-up to face these corrupt people nor do I have the guts to stand up to these dirty idiots,” the bribe payer wrote.

The site has an “I did not pay a bribe” section, where a student from Bangalore, faced with corrupt university officials, “requested the visitors’ book and complaint book, saying that I was going to make a complaint . . . After this the officials suddenly became co-operative”.There is also an “I met an honest officer” section — all points of light in the anti-corruption fight.