There is an easy and obvious way to vastly improve this headline without making it any longer. Delete the second sentence. Done. This removes no information, while eliminating the shady click-bait tactics.

I think that line is a gesture toward the complicated geopolitical implications of bribery of this kind and scale. The goal is to personalize it, so that people will realize its relationship to them. Often, business news is seen as irrelevant to individual lives, but this article attempts to tie it back.

That's not to say that the headline couldn't be improved. Just that from the headline writer's point of view, there is utility in the second sentence.

I'm pretty sure the goal is to play with people's psychology to get them to click. If the goal was to show the relationship to the reader, there are much better ways to do it.

That last bit seems tautological to me. Of course there's utility in the second sentence from the headline writer's point of view, otherwise they wouldn't have put it there. The issue with "clickbait" is that the headline writer's utility diverges from the reader's utility.

> The firm is obscure, so the name doesn't belong in the headline.

I don't see how that works. If the name is obscure, and we should know about it, put it in the headline.

That kind of headlines definitely turn me away. "Here's why we should care" is typically preceding a text which says nothing useful about why we should care. I just won't read articles headlined like this, because they feel like an insult.