Tag Archives: acquisitions

Guest Post: The New French Ruling on Successor Liability Gives French Prosecutors New Leverage to Fight Corruption and Other Corporate Crime

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For today’s guest post, GAB is delighted to welcome back Frederick Davis, a member of the New York and Paris Bars and a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School:

Commentators have aptly observed that US prosecutions of firms for foreign bribery and similar crimes has developed into a “US model of corporate crime deterrence,” a model that is based on aggressive pursuit of corporate entities to induce them to cooperate by “detecting, reporting, and helping prove” criminal acts by individuals in return for a negotiated resolution of the criminal charges against the corporation itself, one that avoids a corporate criminal conviction.

Earlier posts on this blog by myself and by others have noted the absence of this model in France, and the relative ineffectiveness of French prosecutors in pursuing corruption and other forms of corporate crime, in significant part because of the difficulty of proving corporate criminal responsibility under French law. As I noted last year, though, efforts by the Legislature to provide new investigative and prosecutorial tools, by the National Financial Prosecutor to use them, and by the courts in clarifying the principles of corporate criminal responsibility have produced encouraging results. French prosecutors have pursued, and French courts have convicted, both French and non-French corporations for serious crimes. On November 25, 2020, the French Supreme Court (Cour de Cassation) took an important additional step by ruling, for the first time, that in an acquisition situation the successor corporation will generally be criminally responsible for acts committed by the acquired company. The decision closes a significant gap in French corporate criminal deterrence, and will have an immediate and positive impact on corporate criminal investigations in France. Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →