Complying with Antibribery Laws: Mike Koehler’s Strategies for Minimizing Risk Under the FCPA and Related Laws

Posted on by
1

Professor Mike Koehler is perhaps the leading critic of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act – or at least of how the U.S. Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission currently enforce it.  On his FCPA Professor Blog, he regularly bemoans the way the enforcement agencies have stretched a law its authors wrote to outlaw hard core bribery to make donations to foreign charities, internships for relatives of business associates, birthday gifts to business partners, and other seemingly innocuous  conduct a serious felony under American law. Such broad interpretations of the law’s antibribery stricture could never withstand judicial review he argues, but because the costs, reputational and otherwise, of challenging an FCPA enforcement action are so great, companies facing FCPA charges quickly settle rather than contest the agencies’ interpretation in court.  The result is the agencies not only enforce the law but their interpretations in effect make it as well.

So what advice does Professor Koehler proffer businesses wanting to avoid running afoul of the FCPA or the similar laws of other nations in his new book Strategies for Minimizing Risk Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Related Laws?  Does he urge a corporation threatened with an enforcement action based on an overly broad reading of a law to fight back?  Has he produced a polemical guide to compliance?  One written for the risk-taking corporate maverick?  Is this how he separates his book from the many other compliance guides flooding the market?

Not at all. To the contrary, what distinguishes Professor Koehler’s book from many of its competitors is its straightforward, easy to read exposition of what any firm should do to minimize the chances that, thanks to the wayward act of an employee or consultant, it will face allegations it has bribed a government official. In eight tightly-written chapters, he brings his encyclopedic knowledge of FCPA cases, pre-trial settlements of enforcement actions, and the commentary on antibribery law to bear to explain how to develop and implement a sound, reasonable, cost-effective antibribery compliance program. Along the way he chucks the jargon that has grown up around antibribery compliance programs, opting instead for clearly written prose that demystifies rather obscures the process all firms should follow to develop and implement preventive measures.

Take his account in chapter six on how to conduct a risk assessment. Continue reading →

The Debate Over the International Anticorruption Court Continues… This Time in Podcast Form!

Posted on by
Reply

As many GAB readers are aware, Judge Mark Wolf’s vigorous advocacy for the creation of an International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC), modeled on but distinct from the International Criminal Court, has prompted a great deal of commentary and discussion on this blog (see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here), and elsewhere.

Last month Judge Wolf and I had the opportunity to sit down with Alexandra Wrage, the President of TRACE International, to discuss the IACC proposal on an episode of TRACE’s “Bribe, Swindle, or Steal” podcast. The direct link to the podcast is here. You can also find the link on the TRACE podcast main page, which also includes links to a number of past podcasts on anticorruption-related topics, which might also be of interest to GAB readers.

Part-time Legislatures Should Use Disclosure, Not Recusal, To Regulate Conflicts of Interest

Posted on by
16

For most state legislators in the United States, public service is a part-time gig; forty U.S. states have part-time or hybrid legislatures. These part-time state lawmakers have regular jobs, and while some are conventional—law or business—some are less so. (There’s the pizza delivery guy in Arkansas, the boxing and mixed martial arts judge in Nevada, the hula dancer in Hawaii, and the alligator hunter in Louisiana.) Part-time legislatures are popular because they’re cheap—New Hampshire pays its legislators just $100 per year—and also because of distrust of professional politicians and a romantic notion that the legislature should instead be a forum for citizens of varied professional backgrounds to bring their unique perspective to the lawmaking process.

But part-time legislatures also entail significant corruption risks for three reasons. First, when legislators have private sector jobs, it may be easier for them to conceal bribe payments as legitimate outside income. Second, part-time legislators’ low public salaries may make them more inclined to accept bribes or otherwise abuse their office than better-paid full-time legislators. These two factors have been discussed previously on this blog. Here, I want to consider a third factor: the potential conflicts of interest between an official’s public and private work.

A part-time legislator’s dual responsibilities will often, perhaps inevitably, conflict. Teachers will vote on education issues, doctors on health care bills, and business owners on tax plans. Lawyers, lobbyists, and insurance agents may vote on legislation that directly affects their clients. Part-time legislators may even introduce bills advancing their private professional interests. Take the Missouri legislator who introduced and secured passage of a bill prohibiting cities from banning plastic bags at grocery stores—and who also happened to be the director of the Missouri Grocers Association. Similarly egregious, lawyers serving as part-time legislators have sponsored bills raising the salaries or pensions of judges before whom they had cases. One might worry too that part-time legislators, especially those who are lawyers or lobbyists, will implicitly or explicitly use their public positions as a way to drum up business, precisely because potential clients might think that hiring a part-time legislator will increase the odds of favorable legislative treatment. And even if a part-time legislator is not influenced in the slightest by her private professional interests, conflicts like those just described still risk creating the appearance of corruption. What can be done about this?

Continue reading →

Anticorruption Bibliography–November 2018 Update

Posted on by
Reply

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.

It’s in China’s Interest to Fight Corruption on the Belt and Road

Posted on by
10

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), first proposed by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013, is a program through which China will spearhead the funding and construction of new infrastructure and trade networks across Eurasia and Africa. The centerpiece of the BRI is hard infrastructure: roads, railroads, ports, pipelines, and power plants. The scale of the proposed investment is immense: $1 trillion for projects spanning 75 countries.

The risk of corruption in such large-scale infrastructure is also immense, but at least initially, the BRI ignored corruption. When China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the powerful government organ in charge of economic planning, issued the first comprehensive statement of the principles and framework undergirding the BRI back in March 2015, anticorruption principles were nowhere mentioned, nor did the published framework include any anticorruption measures. A later, more detailed policy document, published in 2017, also failed to include any mention of anticorruption. This posture is generally consistent with China’s traditional “non-interference” foreign policy, which makes Chinese authorities reluctant to go after overseas corruption.

More recently, though, Beijing has begun to respond to the BRI’s corruption risks. President Xi himself urged greater international cooperation on anticorruption at the June 2017 Belt and Road Forum. In September 2017, China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection helped organize a symposium called “Strengthening International Cooperation for a Clean Belt and Road.” And last December, the NDRC and other regulatory bodies issued new rules governing overseas investment by private Chinese companies, including a prohibition on “brib[ing] local public officials, or personnel from international organizations or related enterprises.” That same month, China’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission issued new guidance that requires state-owned enterprises to strengthen their anticorruption compliance procedures.

These are steps in the right direction. The question is whether the government’s newfound focus on corruption in the BRI is serious. Skeptics point out that Chinese authorities have never prosecuted a Chinese company or official for foreign bribery. Others suggest that the new regulations are more about controlling Chinese outbound investment than combating overseas corruption. I’m somewhat more optimistic, though, that Chinese authorities are serious about tackling corruption in the BRI. In my view, taking BRI corruption seriously is in the Chinese government’s interest for four reasons:

Continue reading →

Four Steps Brazilian Judge Sergio Moro Can Take to Remain an Anticorruption Fighter as the New Minister of Justice

Posted on by
7

The biggest anticorruption-related news to come out of Brazil since the election of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro as Brazil’s next president has been the announcement that President-Elect Bolsonaro has tapped Judge Sergio Moro—the federal judge who oversaw the trials of several high profile Brazilian politicians in the Car Wash (Lava Jato) operation, including former President Lula Inácio de Silva—to be the next Minister of Justice. Some are hopeful that Judge Moro, who has emerged as an anticorruption hero to many Brazilians, will be well-positioned to use this new high-level post to push forward with systemic anticorruption reforms, including the “New Measures Against Corruption” championed by Transparency International and other civil society activists. Others, including Professor Stephenson in a recent post on this blog, worry that Judge Moro’s acceptance of this position would be a step backward for Brazil’s struggle against corruption, because his appointment could further politicize not only the Lava Jato trials, but the entire country. While President-Elect Bolsonaro wants to portray his appointment of Judge Moro as the first step toward making good on Bolsonaro’s promise to make anticorruption a priority of his administration, this appointment could be seen by centrists or the left as adding insult to injury by giving more power to the man who put Lula behind bars.

If Judge Moro accepts the appointment, then, he will be in a difficult and delicate position. He will have the power to influence the anticorruption agenda (assuming Bolsonaro follows through on his promise to give Moro autonomy in deciding how to deal with organized crime and corruption), but he needs to be sensitive to the fact that his very appointment risks entrenching the view in some quarters that the anticorruption agenda is really a politically-motivated conspiracy against left-wing politicians. There are four things Judge Moro can and should do in his new position to minimize this risk: Continue reading →

New “CurbingCorruption” Website on Sector-Specific Anticorruption Reform Strategies

Posted on by
1

Here at GAB we’re always delighted to welcome more platforms to the online community devoted to discussing, and hopefully making some progress toward addressing, the corruption problem. And so it’s with great pleasure that I commend to all of our readers a new website, CurbingCorruption. The brainchild of Mark Pyman, and developed by him with assistance from several other distinguished anticorruption specialists, CurbingCorruption seeks to provide concrete anticorruption advice tailored to specific sectors (such as construction, education, health, fisheries, etc.) The website is still a work-in-progress, but that’s actually one of the things I found so exciting and innovative about it: The idea, as I understand it, is to use what’s already on the site as a foundation, but to “crowdsource” additions and revisions by inviting users to contribute their own experiences, insights, and suggestions, and eventually for the website to be managed by collaborative groups of users, with different teams focused on different sectors. The site also welcomes inquiries.

This seems like an exciting, innovative experiment in accumulating and synthesizing knowledge about “what works” in anticorruption. I have no idea whether this experiment will be successful—efforts to create online knowledge repositories have had a mixed track record, or so I’ve been told—but I do hope it takes off, and I encourage GAB readers to check it out and perhaps to get involved.

Settling Foreign Bribery Cases: Suggested Guidelines

Posted on by
2

At the request of the OECD Secretary-General, a High Level Advisory Group produced a report in October 2017 on how the OECD could strengthen its work combating corruption and promoting integrity.  One recommendation was that the organization “create and publish model guidelines” for member states to follow when settling cases arising from the bribery of a foreign public official.  Noting concerns (discussed in many posts on this blog and elsewhere) that pretrial settlements can let defendants off too easy, the advisory group cautioned that the guidelines should be “consistent with the requirement for effective, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions under the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.”

Earlier this year, Professor Tina Søreide of the Norwegian School of Economics and former Siemens General Counsel Peter Solmssen organized a multinational group of defense lawyers, prosecutors, academics, and civil society activists to suggest guidelines.  “Principles for the Implementation and Use of Non-Trial Resolutions of Foreign Bribery Cases” together with a set of explanatory notes were released last week.  The principles, the explanatory notes, and a letter transmitting the documents to the OECD are here.

Professor Søreide, Mr. Solmssen, and the others involved in developing the principles welcome reader comments.

“Say It Ain’t So, Sergio!”: Judge Moro’s Appointment to the Bolsonaro Cabinet Is a Setback for Brazil’s Struggle Against Corruption

Posted on by
9

Two weeks ago, far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil. Likely no single factor explains Bolsonaro’s success, but as I noted in a previous post, disgust at the corruption of the Worker’s Party (the PT), which had been exposed by the so-called Car Wash (Lava Jato) investigation, likely played a significant part. The Lava Jato operation has brought to light shocking levels of corruption, mainly though not exclusively at Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras, and has led to the convictions of scores of businesspeople and politicians. Some of the key figures involved in the Lava Jato operation, including prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol and Judge Sergio Moro, have become national heroes, at least in some quarters. But their popularity is by no means universal. The fact that Lava Jato has investigated and convicted so many PT politicians, including former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), has led some PT members and sympathizers to accuse the investigators, prosecutors, and judges involved in the Lava Jato operation as engaged in a politically-motivated right-wing conspiracy against Lula, the PT, and the left generally. On this account, Lula is a “political prisoner,” and the impeachment and removal of his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, was a “coup.”

Many people, me included, have pushed back hard against the notion that the Lava Jato operation is a politically-motivated conspiracy. The evidence that has come too light seems incontrovertible, and while critics have identified a number of questionable decisions by the prosecutors and judges (criticisms I’m not in a position to evaluate on the merits), the notion that it’s all a politically motivated sham are baseless. Overall my impression, shared by many other domestic and international observers, is that the Lava Jato operation has been conducted with great professionalism. Yes, it’s true that the operation has targeted many PT figures, but Lava Jato has gone after politicians from across the political spectrum, and if PT politicians seem to make up a disproportionate share, this is most likely because the PT had held the presidency from 2003 to 2016, first under Lula and then under Dilma. Furthermore, many of us in the international community, along with a number of Brazilian anticorruption scholars and activists, worried that these unsubstantiated attacks on the integrity of Lava Jato—attacks that go beyond challenging individual decisions or rulings—would do serious damage to the longer-term development of an effective set of institutional checks and balances in Brazil. One doesn’t need to subscribe to a naïve view that prosecutors and judges are entirely “neutral” to recognize the importance of developing institutions of justice that are not, and are not perceived as, partisan or “political” in the crude sense.

It’s in that context that I was so disheartened to learn last week that Judge Moro had accepted President-Elect Bolsonaro’s appointment to serve as Minister for Justice. I have no reason to doubt Judge Moro’s integrity or to believe that he accepted this job for any reason other than because he believes it will give him an opportunity to serve his country. But I nonetheless fear that it was a mistake, one that will set back Brazil’s ongoing efforts to develop more robust anticorruption institutions. Continue reading →

When Justifiable Anger Leads to Bad Policy: The Unintended Consequences of Colombia’s Anticorruption Referendum

Posted on by
19

Last August, Colombia held a national referendum on seven anticorruption measures. Despite the fact that six of these measures had previously been proposed in, but failed to pass out of, the lower house of the legislature, popular support for the measures was overwhelming: each measure received 99% “Yes” votes. The referendum did not pass, however, because even though more people voted “yes” on the referendum than voted for the current President, under Colombian law the referendum would only pass if a quorum of 12.1 million citizens voted, and the 11.6 million voters who turned out fell short of that number. Nonetheless, proponents of the referendum declared it a success because it has put public pressure on Colombia’s political leaders to implement these measures. And indeed, President Duque has convened an anticorruption roundtable and vowed to implement all seven measures by December 2018.

Is this a good idea? It’s certainly the case that Colombia needs to do more to combat corruption, which is estimated to cost Colombian taxpayers at least $17 billion a year. But it’s not clear that all of the proposed solutions, though doubtless well-intended, are good public policy. I won’t attempt a comprehensive review of all seven measures here. I’ll put to one side discussion of those measures that focus on improving transparency (for example, by publicizing government budgets, legislators’ voting records, and public officials’ tax returns and asset declarations) or on making penalties more severe (for example, requiring those convicted of corruption to serve their full sentences, and nullifying government contracts with parties convicted of corruption). Rather, I want to address two measures that target Colombian legislators: one of these measures would impose a three-term limit, while the other would substantially cut legislators’ pay.

These two measures appear to reflect understandable public anger at how legislators have abused their positions for private gain. But this retributive impulse may produce bad policy. Indeed, both term limits and salary cuts are likely to prove counterproductive in the fight against corruption in Colombia.

Continue reading →