Matthew Saltmarsh and Caroline Brothers contributed reporting from Paris.

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A series of bribery investigations at leading European companies has helped to accelerate compliance with global anti-corruption standards as managers recognize the risk to their brands and reputations, legal analysts and international regulators say.

''In terms of establishing global standards in the area of bribery and corruption, more progress has probably been made in the last 18 months than in the previous two decades,'' said Richard Cellini, vice president of Integrity Interactive, a consulting firm in Waltham, Massachusetts, that specializes in reducing ethics-and-compliance risk.

''What you are seeing now,'' he said, ''is an increased sensibility among global companies that the reputational damage of bribery allegations has become much more significant than any actual legal consequences.''

Alstom, the French engineering giant, acknowledged on Tuesday that some employees had been questioned recently by French and Swiss investigators looking into accusations that the company paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to gain contracts in Asia and South America from 1995 to 2003.

Also Tuesday, an internal audit by BAE Systems, the British military contractor, found the company had left itself open to corruption charges by failing to pay enough attention to ethics, particularly in a case involving arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Last year, two former executives of the German engineering group Siemens were convicted of bribery in connection with an Italian gas-turbine contract.

Attitudes appear to be hardening in Europe, where laws prohibiting payments to foreign officials or executives in order to win business contracts are still relatively new. Until a few years ago, many European governments even allowed corporations to deduct ''commissions'' paid to win foreign contracts.