- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Neil Hodge2021-10-08T15:43:00
Petrofac’s relatively low penalty for multiple bribery offenses might encourage companies to take their chances when faced with the choice of a possible criminal conviction or cutting a deal with the Serious Fraud Office, legal experts warn.
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The U.K. attorney general is carrying out a review into why—and how—the Serious Fraud Office managed to botch a bribery investigation into Unaoil that saw one of the oil and gas consultancy’s former executives have his conviction overturned.
Petrofac was ordered to pay £77 million (U.S. $105 million) to conclude a long-running investigation into allegations company executives paid to win lucrative oil contracts in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Petrofac will plead guilty to seven counts of failing to prevent bribery, the potential endpoint in a long-running investigation into allegations company executives paid to win lucrative contracts in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
The United States broke from a three-year downturn in bribery-related enforcement actions, while Brazil continued its emergence in the space, according to the results of the latest annual Global Enforcement Report by nonprofit TRACE.
The number of U.S. foreign bribery enforcement actions slowed notably in 2021, while the overall pace of transnational anti-bribery enforcement actions and investigations lagged worldwide, according to TRACE International’s latest enforcement report.
A payment by a U.S.-based company to a third-party intermediary under circumstances that placed an employee’s life and well-being at “significant risk” would not trigger enforcement under the anti-bribery provisions of the FCPA, the Department of Justice stated in an opinion procedure.
