Tag Archives: Bribe Receiving

Guest Post: Important New Developments in U.S. Anticorruption Efforts

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Today’s Guest Post is from Craig R. Arndt, a Yale-trained American lawyer living in Bangkok. During a lengthy career, he advised multinational clients on a range of corruption-related matters and has represented those injured by corruption in actions to recover damages.

Buried in year-end legislation arming America’s military, Congress created two new weapons to advance the global fight against corruption. Section 5101 of the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act makes it a federal crime for a foreign public official “to corruptly demand [or] receive” a bribe from any person or entity subject to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Sections 5403 and 5404 require the Secretary of State to publish an annual report ranking countries in a “three-tiered system with respect to levels of corruption in their governments.”

Both are important, if perhaps controversial, developments in the global fight against corruption.

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The Sometimes Grubby World of Political Fundraising

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The recent bribery charges levelled against New York City Building Commissioner Eric Ulrich remind of the corruption risk the private financing of political parties and candidates creates.

Ulrich raised money for Eric Adams’ successful campaign for New York City Mayor, and after his election Adams appointed him to a position in the city’s Department of Buildings. As the New York Times explained in its story on the charges, “the department regulates the construction and real estate industries, issuing permits, licensing contractors and policing construction safety and the city’s building code, and thus can have a significant impact on development.”  According to the indictment, Ulrich accepted more than $150,000 in bribes in return for granting licenses and permits.

The corruption risk private campaign financing creates arises from candidates’ search for money to win their election. One needs lots of money to get elected Mayor of New York (Adams’s raised more than $9 million.) That in turn requires people willing to help raise it from friends and associates. Some help knowing that if the candidate they are helping wins, they can use the relationship they have developed with the candidate and senior campaign staff to make money. 

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Memo for SEC Chairman Clayton: Getting Other Nations to Enforce Their Antibribery Laws

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In recent remarks to the New York business community, you complain that vigorous enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has had little effect on corruption levels “in many areas of the world.”  The blame, you argue, lies with other nations which don’t enforce their antibribery laws. When companies from these nations seek business in a third state, they are free to, and too often do, bribe their way to commercial success. Indeed, as you explain, their repeated success provides the states where they are headquartered an incentive not to enforce their antibribery laws.

Using the prisoners’ dilemma game, you show that bribery will only be brought under control when all countries with firms that do business in foreign states agree to crack down on the payment of bribes.  And you promise that whenever you speak to counterparts in these countries, you will try to persuade them of the value of “common, cooperative enforcement strategies.”  But while the prisoners’ dilemma paradox underscores why all countries where firms that may pay bribes are located must enforce their antibribery laws, it obscures another important step in the global fight against corruption. One that the Commission can do much to advance.    Continue reading →

Sextortion Victims Are Not Guilty of Bribery

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On this blog, I have repeatedly called for the anticorruption community to put greater emphasis on fighting sexual corruption around the world. I have argued that a police officer demanding sex in order to perform (or not perform) an official function is a form of bribery; in a few cases, officials have been charged with and convicted of bribery or official misconduct for sexual corruption.

Characterizing this sort of sexual coercion as bribery, however, raises a potential problem: In typical monetary corruption cases, it is possible to prosecute the bribe giver as well as the bribe receiver. Does that mean that the private citizen (almost always a woman) from whom sexual favors are extorted by a public official could be deemed to have “paid” an unlawful bribe? Unfortunately, the idea of charging victims of sexual corruption with bribery is not too far-fetched. In one New York case, two police officers demanded sex from a female motorist if she wanted to avoid arrest (for drugs found in her car); at the officers’ trial, the jury was instructed that the woman was an accomplice as a matter of law to bribe receiving. The appellate court wrote that the test for whether the woman can be considered an accomplice is whether she “theoretically could have been convicted of any crime based on at least some of the same facts that must be proven in order to convict the defendant.” And because the woman in this case acquiesced to the officers’ demands, she met the definition of an accomplice to bribe receiving. (She was not charged, but according to the court she could have been.)

Thus one potential concern with heeding the call to treat so-called “sextortion” as a corruption offense (that is, soliciting a bribe) is that it could lead to greater use of anti-bribery laws to charge the women from whom sex is extorted. (For example, suppose an American businesswoman had sexual relations with a foreign procurement officer as a quid pro quo for receiving a government contract; the businesswoman in this case could conceivably be charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.) It will be crucial to ensure that this never happens. This can be accomplished through a generous interpretation of coercion as a defense to bribery, informed by the existing American jurisprudence on sexual harassment in the employment setting.

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