All Anti-Bribery articles – Page 47
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Blog
This Phrase Is a Key Corruption Indicator
Image: Title: FoxCorporate scandals come in many forms, and can violate any number of federal statutes. For compliance officers, however, some key phrases—such as one that has turned up in scandals including Volkswagen and Hewlett-Packard—are the words that should guide your program. When employees utter them, they need to know ...
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FIFA Corruption Scandal: A Business Solution Coming?
Image: The fallout from the FIFA corruption scandal continues across the globe (literally), with FIFA audit committee members suspended and investigations expanded. As the next wave of soccer tournaments reaches the planning stages, however, we might be starting to see FIFA taking business practices seriously. Our Man From FCPA, Tom ...
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Compliance and Ethics Sputters at Volkswagen
Image: This week, anti-corruption blogger Tom Fox takes a closer look at the scandal involving Volkswagen and its diesel engine cars, intentionally designed to cheat emission standard testing through software nicknamed “defeat devices.” The world’s biggest carmaker admitted to U.S. watchdogs that it deliberately rigged computers in its cars ...
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Analogic Proposes $1.6 Million FCPA Settlement
Analogic, an airport security and medical-imaging technology provider, said in a quarterly filing this week that it has proposed a $1.6 million settlement to the Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case.The potential sanctions concern certain questionable transactions involving Analogic’s Danish subsidiary BK Medical and ...
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Yates Memo: More Change Coming in FCPA Enforcement
Two weeks ago, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement took a formal turn when the Justice Department released the Yates Memo, which formalized the department’s new focus on prosecuting individuals under the FCPA. In the same week, there was a much less reported event that could have equally large effect on ...
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Internal Investigations Just Got a Lot More Complicated
Image: Compliance officers should brace themselves after Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’ speech last week calling for more prosecution of individuals involved in corporate misconduct—the implications for internal investigations are huge. Inside we have the full analysis of how this policy shift, which sharply splits company and executive interests, will ...
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Despite Progress, Anti-Corruption Risks Continue
Last week KPMG released a report on anti-bribery and corruption programs that will surprise nobody: Compliance challenges are growing, and third parties are harder to manage than ever. After nearly a decade of anti-corruption awareness and compliance programs, then, the real question is: Why is anti-bribery still so hard? Inside, ...
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The FCPA Enforcement World Changed Last Week
Image: The Yates Memo issued by the Justice Department last week, insisting that companies work much harder to help prosecute individuals if they want to receive cooperation credit, is likely to be a sea change in how compliance officers must address problems like Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations. Our FCPA ...
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Flying the Unfriendly Skies of Investigations and Resignations
Image: Title: SmisekRarely in compliance do you see a CEO resignation as unceremonious as the ouster earlier this week of now former head of United-Continental, Jeff Smisek (left). While his removal doesn’t involve foreign government officials—only local ones at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—it does provide ...
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Blood Is Not Thicker Than FCPA Risk
The SEC has now taken its first enforcement action in a “princeling” case, fining BNY Mellon for offering plum internships to the relatives of foreign officials to win business with their countries’ sovereign wealth funds. Inside, columnist Tom Fox looks at the case (which is probably the first of several) ...
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FCPA Lessons in Deflate-gate: Consistency of Discipline
For those in the FCPA world I would like to focus on one aspect of the court’s ruling: consistency in discipline. In Brady’s appeal, the court was highly critical of the fact that the NFL policy for discipline for first offenses involving equipment violations would result in fines rather than ...
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More ABC Angst in Latest Compliance Survey
Image: Fresh news from the world of surveys: Corruption risks have risen sharply in the last few years, and while compliance officers agree that an anti-corruption risk assessment is critical, many still struggle to perform that task well. So says the latest anti-bribery & corruption survey from KPMG. More findings ...
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Federal Judge Limits Scope of FCPA Liability
A recent decision by U.S. District Judge Janet Arterton for the District of Connecticut has rejected the Department of Justice's "accomplice" theory of liability under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, substantially limiting the reach of the government’s enforcement arm under the FCPA. The ruling in the case, in favor of ...
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Do You Have a Windows 95 FCPA Compliance Program?
I find the world of sports to be a rich source of tutorials on things not to do for the FCPA compliance practitioner; from suspending Tom Brady for events which happened after DeflateGate, to the St. Louis Cardinals hacking the Houston Astros (of all teams) to steal secrets around player ...
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More on Poverty, Bribery, and Compliance
Image: Earlier this week I wrote about poverty: how its brutal reality makes corporate compliance programs so difficult to implement, because people in emerging markets (foreign officials and employees alike) need to take bribes to survive. Then came a recent conversation with a foreign official in said emerging markets, and ...
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FCPA and Pursuing Foreign Officials: The Mikerin Example
Image: Many Europeans wonder why the U.S. Justice Department does not prosecute foreign officials who receive bribes in violation of the FCPA. The reason, according to CW blogger Tom Fox, is that the FCPA is a supply-side law that does not criminalize the receipt of bribes. But the Justice Department ...
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Article
Global Transparency Failures Endure, Adding Risk
Image: One of the great challenges for U.S. compliance officers as they build global programs is the basic lack of transparency into enforcement information in other countries. Two new reports give a better scope of the problem, even if the picture revealed is not terribly encouraging. “Getting access to information ...
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What’s Behind the Endemic Nature of Bribery: Poverty
Image: For all a company’s efforts to preach anti-corruption compliance worldwide, one ugly fact endures: Too many people in too many countries still need to pay bribes simply to survive. Ethics training has virtually nothing to do with the problem, editor Matt Kelly writes. The real challenge is how we ...
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Naming and Shaming in FCPA Enforcement
One thing that critics of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act constantly flail is the (alleged) lack of individual prosecutions under the law. Perhaps naming and shaming individuals responsible for actual FCPA violations would get word to the business community to take anti-corruption more seriously.
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Gerald Green and Draconian Results of an Adverse FCPA Verdict
Gerald Green, one of the few individuals who went to trial against the Justice Department in a case where the government alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, passed away last week. Green and his wife Patricia were convicted in 2009 of conspiring with others to bribe a Thailand ...