Short answers, pulled from the story.
Corruption is dishonest or criminal conduct by a person or organization entrusted with authority, undertaken to acquire illicit benefits or abuse power for personal gain. It includes bribery, embezzlement, fraud, influence peddling, graft, extortion, state capture, and in some frameworks legal forms such as campaign finance and golden passport schemes.
The Corruption Perceptions Index ranks countries by their perceived levels of public sector corruption based on expert assessments and opinion surveys. It has been published annually by the non-governmental organization Transparency International since 1995. Critics including George Monbiot argue the index uses a narrow definition that systematically under-measures corruption in wealthy countries.
Speed money refers to petty bribes paid to bureaucrats to bypass hurdles or accelerate routine processes, associated with what economists call the efficient grease hypothesis. Access money, as defined by political economist Yuen Yuen Ang, is high-stakes rewards extended by business actors to powerful officials to gain exclusive, valuable privileges, functioning more like a strategic investment than a transactional bribe.
In 2007, Siemens was convicted in the District Court of Darmstadt for paying nearly 3.5 million euros in bribes to win a 200 million euro contract from the Italian company Enel Power SpA. The payments were routed through black money accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. It was the first time a German court prosecuted a foreign corrupt practice as it would a domestic one.
Corruption is strongly negatively associated with private investment and lowers economic growth rates by reducing the returns on productive activities and increasing the cost of doing business. Yuen Yuen Ang uses the analogy of drugs: petty and grand theft are toxic, speed money acts like painkillers, and access money resembles steroids that can spur growth but risk complete meltdown. A notable exception is South Korea under President Park Chung Hee, where selective favoritism of companies was used to enforce a government development strategy.
State capture was first used by the World Bank in 2000 to describe how small corrupt groups use influence over government officials to shape laws and decision-making in their favor. Unlike most corruption that exploits existing laws, state capture seeks to influence the formation of laws from the outset. It is not necessarily illegal depending on how the captured state itself defines legality.