Monthly Archives: February 2021

Principles for Victim Remediation in Foreign Bribery Cases

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There is a broad consensus that foreign bribery harms the citizens and governments of developing nations. But in most cases where enforcement agencies in a “supply side” jurisdiction (that is, the home jurisdiction of the companies that paid the bribes) reach a settlement with a company accused of bribing foreign officials, the settlement does not provide for any remedial payments to the government or citizens of the “demand side” country where the bribery took place. Given the inherent difficulties in setting right the harm corruption causes, this is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, scholars and activists have increasingly called for settlement agreements between supply side enforcers and bribe-paying companies to include requirements that the companies make such remediation to the victims of the foreign bribery scheme, and some prosecutorial agencies, like the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the U.K. Serious Fraud Office (SFO), have occasionally done something along these lines. They have done so, however, only intermittently, and as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, without any overarching policy agenda or conceptual framework.

In a recent article, I proposed a framework that could achieve more consistent outcomes and be used as a benchmark for developing best practices. I do not focus on grand designs for a private right of action for the foreign victims of corruption, or on obligations under international law. Because the action is happening on the ground, through the exercise of prosecutorial discretion in negotiating settlements, that’s where I focus. In this post, I outline the factors that enforcement agencies should take into account when deciding whether to pursue remediation in any given case. Continue reading →

International Anticorruption Academy Spring Course on Obtaining Mutual Legal Assistance

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It is the rare corruption investigation today that does not cross one or more national boundaries.  The bribe payer is located in one country, the bribe taker in a second, and the bribe stashed in a third.  Successful prosecution of the payer and the taker and recovery of assets requires collecting information in multiple jurisdictions, and though obtaining evidence abroad has progressed far beyond sending a letter rogatory and hoping for the best, the process is still involved. A misstep can delay receipt of needed material by months if not years and in some cases can permanently bar its receipt.

How to speed the process of obtaining evidence from another country while avoiding common missteps is the focus of a four-week, online course offered by the International Anticorruption Academy April 12 through May 8, 2021. As the course description explains, it will cover not only the formal request and receipt of information for use at trial, but informal avenues for obtaining leads, “tips,” and intelligence to advance an ongoing investigation. The two methods, collectively termed Mutual Legal Assistance or MLA, require investigators, prosecutors, and increasingly defense counsel to combine knowledge of domestic and international law with a practical savvy about how to get things done. The instructor, yours truly, will cover both with the help of guest lecturers who will discuss use of the UNODC’s MLA writer tool and obtaining evidence from the United States and Switzerland.

An outline of the topics to be covered (with welcome input from a certain GWU adjunct law professor — thank Tom) is here and a bibliography here.  Comments on either welcome.  Registration information is here.

Anticorruption Bibliography–February 2021 Update

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An updated version of my anticorruption bibliography is available from my faculty webpage. A direct link to the pdf of the full bibliography is here, and a list of the new sources added in this update is here. As always, I welcome suggestions for other sources that are not yet included, including any papers GAB readers have written.

Let’s Talk About Monaco

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Monaco, the sovereign city-state on France’s Mediterranean coast, is many things. It is the second smallest country in the world, following only Vatican City. It boasts the highest GDP per capita of any country. It is a constitutional monarchy, ruled by the same family for over 700 years. It is known for its opulent casino, expensive real estate, and swaggering F1 drivers.

It is also willfully resistant to the Council of Europe’s anticorruption transparency recommendations – or any transparency measures at all, for that matter.

Perhaps due to its small size, Monaco has flown somewhat under the radar in international corruption monitoring. The city-state doesn’t feature in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index, and TI’s web page for Monaco is quite blank. Despite being an international tax haven and banking center, Monaco is conspicuously missing from both the World Bank’s Doing Business rankings and the Heritage Foundation’s index of economic freedom. It’s not that Monaco is a corruption-free paradise. In the few lists in which it does appear, Monaco does not score particularly well: In the RAND Corporation’s Business Bribery Risk Assessment, for instance, Monaco ranked 72nd out of 192 jurisdictions. And a number of recent corruption scandals have involved Monaco, either directly or indirectly. Last year, for example, two brothers who ran a Monaco-based consultancy called Unaoil pleaded guilty in the United States to charges involving millions of dollars in bribes paid between 1999 and 2016. Corruption alarms were also raised in July 2019, when Monaco’s justice minister abruptly blocked term renewal for a judge leading a corruption inquiry that involved a Russian billionaire, a former Monaco justice minister, senior Monaco police officials, and others. More recently, in late November 2020, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy went on trial for attempting to bribe a French magistrate with a prestigious job in Monaco.

These incidents have largely come to light because of involvement outside of Monaco: international companies, legal battles that cross borders, and foreign politicians. Monaco itself remains something of a black box. As a 2017 report from the Council of Europe’s Group of States Against Corruption (GRECO) noted, there are no records whatsoever of criminal or disciplinary proceedings related to corruption in Monaco’s parliament. This lack of reported cases, GRECO concluded, is likely due not to an absence of corruption, but to a lack of oversight. As the report noted, Monaco has “few mechanisms to ensure satisfactory transparency of parliamentary work and consultations,” and lacks a “code of conduct that would govern, among other things, the acceptance of gifts and other benefits, the management of conflicts of interest, or relations with lobbies and other third parties seeking to influence parliamentary processes and decisions.” The GRECO report further observed that although judicial proceedings are typically public, there is a carve-out for holding court behind closed doors where public proceedings “might cause a scandal or serious inconvenience.” Cases “concerning the internal operation of courts” are also not public. In practice, there is even less transparency than the official policies would indicate, as most criminal cases are in fact dealt with in France, behind closed doors.

Without a code of conduct against corruption-related activities, with no mechanisms to provide oversight, with any corruption scandals that do occur likely to be tried in secret, and with little international attention on the issue beyond infrequent GRECO reports, Monaco can keep its corruption well hidden. Although occasional scandals might pop up around Monaco, the country makes it difficult to know the nature and extent of its corruption.

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Fighting Corruption in Nigeria’s Forestry and Fishery Industries

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Although Nigeria is known mainly for oil and gas production, Nigeria’s agriculture sector, including forestry and fisheries, now accounts for over 21% of the country’s GDP. Despite the benefits of the forestry and fisheries industries to Nigeria’s development, corruption-fueled illicit activities in these sectors threaten to destabilize local communities and damage the environment. Two areas of illicit activity are of particular concern:

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Guest Post: An Anticorruption Agenda for the Biden Administration

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Today’s guest post is from Lucinda A. Low and Shruti Shah, respectively Acting Chair and President of the Coalition for Integrity, a U.S. based non-governmental organization focused on fighting corruption. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and should not be attributed to the organization..  

The United States has a long history, across administrations of both parties, of showing leadership internationally in the fight against corruption. The passage and enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has served as an example for other countries to adopt their own transnational anti-bribery laws. Additionally, the United States has championed international anti-bribery efforts in multilateral organizations and worked to build coalitions to root out all types of corruption. For the last several years, however, U.S. has faltered. In order to reestablish the U.S. as a global leader against corruption, and to get its own house in order, the Biden Administration and the new Congress should embrace an ambitious agenda that includes the following elements: Continue reading →

Kleptocracy in Mongolia: Deutsche Bank As Batbold’s Enabler

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To the left is a document showing how Deutsche Bank helped Mongolian politician Sukhbaatar Batbold hide assets offshore (full-size copy here). Written by Deutsche Bank executives in Hong Kong, it asks the bank’s Guernsey Island office to “establish and manage the offshore trust structure The Quantum Lake Trust on [Batbold’s] behalf.” The authors assure their Guernsey colleagues that there no reason to be suspicious about the request:

“We are unaware of any activities in which the above client [Batbold] engages which leads us to suspect that the client is involved in money laundering.” In fact, on the day the letter was written Batbold was a Member of Parliament and between 2004 and 2006 was Cabinet Minister of Trade and Industry (here). In money laundering terms he was a “politically exposed person.” As a consequence, Deutsche Bank was required to scrutinize his past activities before creating the trust and to closely monitor all future transactions with the bank or the trust to ensure they were lawful. There is no evidence Deutsche Bank ever conducted what the money laundering law terms this “enhanced due diligence.”

Two weeks ago Batbold denied ever having “any open or hidden accounts, money, apartments or property in the offshore zone” (here), but as the letter and other documents made public last Friday show, he is at least prevaricating if not lying. He has or has had numerous accounts and properties offshore. Batbold’s representative ducked questions GAB has asked (here) about the trust and Batbold’s offshore properties, issuing a short, blanket denial reprinted below.

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New Podcast, Featuring Gary Kalman

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, we’re delighted to welcome back to the podcast Gary Kalman, the Director of Transparency International’s United States office. I was fortunate to be able to interview Gary a little over one year ago, just before he stepped into his new role as TI’s U.S. Director. In our more recent conversation, we had the opportunity to discuss how his first year in this position has gone, touching on some major successes–most notably the passage of the Corporate Transparency Act, which requires companies to provide the government with information on their true beneficial owners–as well as ongoing challenges. Gary discusses some of the advocacy strategies that proved effective on the corporate transparency issues, and suggests how similar strategies might be deployed to advance other aspects of the anticorruption agenda. He also lays out what he sees as the highest priorities for TI’s advocacy work in the United States, and what vulnerabilities have been exposed by the experience with the Trump Administration and how those might be addressed. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

The New FCPA Resource Guide Wisely Suggests a More Flexible Approach to Successor Liability

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When a company subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) merges with or acquires another company that is also covered by the FCPA, should the former company also acquire the latter’s potential FCPA liability? In other words: Suppose Company A acquires Company B, and evidence later comes to light that prior to the acquisition, Company B’s employees paid bribes to foreign government officials, in violation of the FCPA. Can or should Company A be subject to a post-acquisition enforcement action for these earlier FCPA violations? This is known (in the FCPA context and elsewhere) as the question of “successor liability.” In U.S. law, the general rule is that successors inherit the acquired company’s civil and criminal liabilities. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which share responsibility for enforcing the FCPA, have long argued that there is no reason to make an exception to this general rule for FCPA cases. Yet critics have argued that successor liability in the FCPA context “can kill deals.” Numerous transactions have fallen through or decreased in value because of corruption-related concerns, and other transactions became costlier due to such risks.

The DOJ and the SEC’s traditional response to such concerns—as laid out in the first edition of their FCPA Resource Guide, published in 2012—is that companies should conduct pre-acquisition due diligence to identify red flags and potentially undertake various forms of remediation. Furthermore, the agencies have stated that they might decline to pursue enforcement actions against an acquiring firm on a successor liability theory if that firm’s pre-acquisition efforts were adequate. The problem, though, is that pre-acquisition due diligence on possible FCPA violations is often difficult or impossible to conduct properly. In some cases, laws in foreign countries known as blocking statutes may prevent the acquiring firm from getting the information it needs from the target company (see, for example, here and here). More generally, there are numerous practical reasons why pre-acquisition due diligence on possible FCPA violations may not be possible, including time-sensitivity, the difficulty of accessing data stored or located in distant places, and the target company’s reluctance to cooperate with external investigations that could result in the target’s personnel facing criminal exposure. These factors can make pre-acquisition due diligence impractical.

The DOJ and SEC appear to have acknowledged and responded to that concern in the second edition of the FCPA Resource Guide, published this past July. While the second edition’s treatment of successor liability seems mostly the same as in the first edition (save for some wording adjustments and references to more recent cases), the second edition also includes one short but potentially crucial additional paragraph, which reads as follows:

DOJ and SEC also recognize that, in certain instances, robust pre-acquisition due diligence may not be possible. In such instances, DOJ and SEC will look to the timeliness and thoroughness of the acquiring company’s post-acquisition due diligence and compliance integration efforts.

Although subtle, this passage represents a potentially important shift, as it indicates that the DOJ and SEC will consider not only pre-acquisition due diligence, but also post-acquisition measures, when deciding whether to pursue enforcement actions against a company on a successor liability theory.

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How Ethno-Religious Divisions Stymie Anticorruption Reform in Malaysia–and What to Do About It

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In 2018, Malaysia surmounted the biggest test of its democracy since gaining independence from Britain in 1963—the first democratic transfer of power in the country’s history. That change in leadership occurred in the wake of the 1MDB scandal—one of the largest kleptocracy schemes ever uncovered—which implicated former Prime Minister Najib Razak. The repudiation of Najib and his party, UNMO, in the 2018 election was seen by many as a hopeful sign that the Malaysian people were no longer willing to tolerate the systemic corruption that had long been seen as business as usual. To be sure, the leader of the victorious coalition in the 2018 election—nonagenarian Mahathir Mohamed, who had previously served as Prime Minister from 1983 to 2001—was an unlikely champion of anticorruption and good governance reform. Yet in 2018, Mahathir’s victory was cause for hope that there would finally be genuine systemic reform.

Within two years, that hope had all but vanished. Prime Minister Mahathir was forced to resign in the middle of his first term in office and was replaced by UMNO politician Muhyiddin Yassin, who had served as Deputy Prime Minister under Najib. What went wrong? In an earlier post, I explored how a free press and multi-party government may have contributed to the failure of Mahathir’s coalition. But that is not the whole story. Those democratic institutions were susceptible to manipulation because of the deeply embedded ethnic and religious divisions that have been a defining feature of Malaysian politics since independence. By exacerbating racial and religious tensions, UMNO managed to convince key voting blocs that the biggest threat they faced was not corrupt politicians, but rather their neighbors who look and pray differently. In short, the reformist coalition ultimately failed because the Malaysian populace lost sight of their common enemy: the corrupt system of governance robbing them all.

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