Tag Archives: corporate compliance programs

Guest Post: Corporate Criminal Liability and Corruption in Italy — Early Findings from an Ongoing Research Project

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In Italy, as in many other countries, little data is available to evaluate the effect of the corporate liability regime — on deterring corporate crime and on the companies themselves. A research project supported by the Milan-based Fondazione Centro Nazionale di Prevenzione e Difesa Sociale (the National Center for Social Protection and Defense Foundation or CNPDS) has set out to fill the void. Coordinated by Professors Stefano Manacorda and Francesco Centonze, the project has enlisted Italian judicial institutions and the private sector in the collection of empirical data.

For the first time the Ministry of Justice, the Office of the General Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Cassation, and two business associations, — Confindustria, which represents more than 150,000 Italian companies, and Assonime, representing the Italian companies listed on the Italian stock market, — are collaborating to gather information on the impact of a law.  Below Marco Colacurci of the Università della Campania and Pierpaolo Astorina of the Università di Bergamo, two assistant Professors involved in the project, explain the data they are gathering and summarize what they have learned so far about corporate liability for corruption.

Their findings will likely be of great interest not only to GAB readers but to the OECD, which will soon assess Italy’s compliance with the Anti-Bribery Convention. Thanks to Professors Colacurci and Astorina for sharing their work with GAB and to Professor Stefano Manacorda for facilitating it.

Twenty years have passed since Italy introduced liability for companies (the liability is formally administrative but modelled on the criminal features). Possible reforms to the legislation are now a matter of intense debate.. Anniversaries indeed represent valuable occasions to reflect on what works and what does not, and the same goes for Legislative Decree n. 231/2001. Conferences and seminars are underway in Italy both to celebrate the law that introduced the direct liability of corporations for crimes committed by individuals acting for them, and, at the same time, to highlight the critiques that have emerged over the years.

These latter have several aspects, such as the under-use of international standards in the creation and judicial evaluation of compliance programs, the intense discretionary powers of public prosecutors and criminal judges, the lack of recognition of pretrial diversion mechanisms apt to stimulate effective forms of corporate cooperation, the failure to consider the size and organizational complexity of companies, and the list could go on.

Most of all, and despite the growing attention which scholars (and law firms) have been directing towards liability over the last two decades, the praxis seems to show that prosecutions for corporate crimes are rare. Consequently, judgments too are rare, and decisions acknowledging the adequacy of the compliance programs adopted by indicted companies are scarce. This could reflect a degree of indifference in this area, on the part of the public prosecutors’ offices or, alternatively, could be interpreted as a sign of the preventive effects of the Decree 231.

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Review of Gemma Aiolfi’s Anticorruption Compliance for Small and Mid-Sized Organizations

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For almost two decades the Basel Institute on Governance has advised corporations large and small, first in Europe and now around the globe, on how to develop a robust anticorruption compliance program. One that will prevent the company from becoming entangled in a corruption scandal while at the same time neither compromising its ability to compete nor dampening its entrepreneurial energy. Gemma Aiolfi, who has headed the Institute’s corporate compliance work for the last seven years, presents the Institute’s collective experiences in a new volume from Elgar, Anti-Corruption Compliance for Small and Mid-Sized Organizations.

What sets Aiolfi’s book apart from the many fine volumes already on the market (examples here, here, and here) is that it is leavened with literally dozens of examples drawn from the Institute’s work. How should a company establishing a compliance program handle personnel used to doing business “the old way”?  What should a manager do if she discovers police in a developing country are threatening to shut down critical operations if the company’s low-level frontline personnel don’t pay them off? How should a company deal with senior government officials’ requests for lavish travel and entertainment allowances when visiting a company’s operations? Discussions of how to handle each, with suitably anonymized case studies explaining how management actually dealt with them, is what makes the volume so useful.

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Guest Announcement: OECD Report and Webinar on Corporate Anticorruption Compliance

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France Chain, Senior Legal Analyst at the OECD’s Anti-Corruption Division, provides the following announcement regarding next week’s OECD webinar on “What really motivates anti-corruption compliance?”, an event which coincides with the launch of the new OECD Study on Corporate Anti-Corruption Compliance Drivers, Mechanisms and Ideas for Change.

Since the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention came into force in 1999, managing the risk of bribery has been identified as one of the most challenging areas of compliance for multinational businesses. Major foreign bribery scandals have resulted in record-breaking fines, which has seen the field of compliance grow exponentially over the past ten years. The OECD Foreign Bribery Report revealed that over 40% of foreign bribery cases involved management-level employees either paying or authorizing bribes, with CEOs involved in 12% of cases. At the same time, companies have shown that they can play a key role in detecting and responding to corruption. The OECD’s 2017 report on the Detection of Foreign Bribery showed that 23% of foreign bribery cases that resulted in definitive sanctions over the last 20 years were detected via self-reporting by companies.

However, implementing an effective compliance program is no easy task, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further heightened the challenges. With companies under great financial pressure to recover, anticorruption compliance departments and systems are being put to the test as never before.

To help shed light on some of these challenges and show us the way forward, a forthcoming OECD study on Corporate Anti-Corruption Compliance Drivers, Mechanisms and Ideas for Change explores what motivates companies to adopt anticorruption compliance measures, and looks at how companies (including small and medium-sized enterprises) could further be incentivized to do so. The study also underlines some of the main challenges faced by companies looking to implement anticorruption programs and proposes potential solutions, including ways for governments, international organizations, and civil society to better support companies in their anticorruption efforts.

The official launch of this study will take place on September 23 (one week from tomorrow), with a webinar panel discussion on What really motivates anti-corruption compliance?” to take place on September 23 from 15:00 to 16:30 Central European Time (9:00 am to 10:30 am U.S. East Coast time). You can register for the webinar here. The panel will bring together:

  • Axel Threlfall, Editor-at-large, Thomson Reuters (moderator)
  • Anna Hallberg, Minister of Foreign Trade and Nordic Affairs of Sweden (opening remarks)
  • Jeffrey Schlagenhauf, OECD Deputy Secretary-General (opening remarks)
  • France Chain, Senior Legal Analyst, OECD Anti-Corruption Division (presentation of key findings from the Study)
  • Alma Balcázar, Co-founder and Principal of GR Compliance SAS and Member of the International Council of Transparency International
  • Andrew Gentin, Assistant Chief, Fraud Section, Criminal Division, United States Department of Justice
  • Corinne Lagache, Chair, Business at OECDAnti-Corruption Committee, and Senior Vice President, Group Compliance Officer, Safran
  • Caroline Lindgren, Head of Legal and Local Compliance Officer of Sweco Sverige AB

Those attending the webinar will be able to submit questions through the chat during the live discussion on Zoom. The session will be recorded and subsequently posted on the OECD Anti-corruption and Integrity website.

How Anticorruption Enforcement Can Undermine Antitrust Amnesty Programs, and What To Do About It

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One of the most important law enforcement techniques that has emerged in the last few decades to combat cartels (anticompetitive collusion between competitors) is the use of programs that promise automatic amnesty to the first member of a cartel to self-report the illegal enterprise. These amnesty programs enable law enforcement authorities to gather the evidence they need to build strong cases against other members of the scheme, and, perhaps more importantly, these amnesty programs destabilize cartels—and might even deter their formation—by taking advantage of the incentive that individual cartel members have to cheat on each other. Since the 1990s, after the success of the amnesty program pioneered by the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), antitrust amnesty programs have been replicated in many jurisdictions, leading some to declare a “leniency revolution” in competition law.

But the existing amnesty programs have a weakness They usually only offer protection for violations of antitrust laws, leaving even the firm that self-reports the antitrust violations potentially liable for other unlawful conduct that the cartel members engaged in as part of their anticompetitive scheme. And many of these anticompetitive schemes turn out to involve corruption, especially in the public procurement context. Cartels often bribe the official in charge of the procurement process, because a corrupt official can monitor and punish defections from the cartel, facilitate the exclusion of non-aligned competitors, and ensure an equal distribution of cartel profits. A firm that hopes to take advantage of an antitrust amnesty program might have to report all of this to qualify for amnesty, as often the programs require, as a condition for amnesty, reporting on the involvement not only of other cartel members, but of any public officials who may have facilitated the collusive conduct. But the fact that a self-reporting cartel member is not guaranteed amnesty from prosecution for corruption or other associated wrongdoing (such as money laundering) complicates the operation of antitrust amnesty programs, because this lack of guaranteed amnesty weakens the incentive of cartel members to self-report in cases where the cartel has engaged in bribery. The problem is especially pronounced when the penalties for bribery are much more severe than those typically imposed in cartel cases.

This is less of a problem in jurisdictions where anticorruption and antitrust authorities are departments of a single agency, as with the US Department of Justice (DOJ). But in many other jurisdictions, such as the EU, Brazil, and Mexico, competition law enforcement—and administration of the antitrust amnesty programs—are handled by enforcement agencies that do not have authority to prosecute corruption cases. From a potential self-disclosing company’s perspective, this poses a challenge: Disclosing participation in a bribe-paying cartel to the competition authority may also trigger an enforcement action by the separate agency responsible for prosecuting corruption, meaning the company will have to negotiate with both agencies, with the anticorruption agency not bound by the antitrust amnesty program. Indeed, in many countries anticorruption agencies may not have the same authority as antitrust agencies to grant leniency to self-reporting companies. In Brazil, for instance, though an antitrust amnesty program has been in place since 2000, settling corruption cases only became possible in 2014. In Mexico, the antitrust amnesty program was created in 2006, but a program for self-reporting bribery cases only entered into force in 2016. In both countries, although there is an established process for settling corruption investigations, there is no immunity provision for self-reporting; a discount in the applicable fines is often the best a firm can hope for. And even when both the antitrust agency and the anticorruption agency have authority to settle and grant leniency, the mere fact that a company knows it will need to enter into two or more separate negotiations increases the uncertainty and costs associated with self-disclosure, undermining the effectiveness of the amnesty program.

How should this problem be addressed in those countries where merging authority over antitrust and anticorruption enforcement in a single agency is not feasible or desirable? There are several possibilities:

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Are Corporate Anticorruption Compliance Programs Effective?

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Requiring business corporations to institute an anticorruption compliance program should be a part of any national strategy to fight corruption.  The argument is simple.  Corporate employees or their agents are always on the paying side of a bribery offense and often a facilitator of conflict of interest and other forms of corruption.  Making it against company policy for employees or agents to participate in any corrupt act with stringent sanctions up to and including termination for a violation will help shut down the supply side of the corruption equation.

Even where a company’s compliance program is a sham, established simply to comply with the law, it can still help in combating corruption.  A sham program would be a violation of law, and were the company investigated, the existence of a sham program would be easy for investigators to spot, easing their task of determining wrongdoing.  So there seems to be no reason why lawmakers shouldn’t insist that firms subject to their law, whether state-owned or privately-held, establish a program.  And between the many guides published by international organizations (examples here and here), NGOs (here and here), academics, the burgeoning compliance industry, and the issuance of an international standard for such programs, there is no dearth of information on how to create and operate an effective one.

I have argued the case for a compliance requirement in several posts (examples here and here), as have many other GAB contributors (examples here and here).  My most recent plea for mandating private sector compliance programs came in this one noting such a requirement in Vietnam’s new anticorruption law.  But one thing I have not done is address two obvious questions about compliance programs that Matthew posed in a comment to the Vietnam post: How are compliance requirement laws enforced? How effective are they in practice?

It turns out these obvious, innocent sounding questions (the kind law professors always seem to ask) aren’t all that easy to answer.  What I have found so far follows.  Readers with more information earnestly requested to supplement it. Continue reading →

The UK Parliament Should Broaden and Sharpen the Legal Advice Privilege in Order to Encourage More Internal Investigations into Corruption

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On September 5, 2018, the compliance departments and outside counsel of large corporations operating in the UK breathed a collective sigh of relief. In a much anticipated ruling, the Court of Appeal of England and Wales overturned a trial judge’s order that would have compelled a London-based international mining company, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation Limited (ENRC), to hand over documents to UK prosecutors investigating the enterprise for bribery in Kazakhstan and Africa. Those documents were the product of an investigation that ENRC’s outside legal counsel had conducted following an internal whistleblower report that surfaced in late 2010. In conducting that internal investigation, lawyers from the law firm interviewed witnesses, reviewed financial records, and advised ENRC’s management on the company’s possible criminal exposure. Though the company tried to keep everything quiet, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) came knocking in mid-2011. The SFO agreed to let ENRC and its lawyers continue to investigate on their own, periodically updating the SFO on their progress. In 2013, ENRC’s legal counsel submitted its findings to the SFO in a report arguing that, on the basis of the facts presented, the company should not be charged. The SFO disagreed and launched a formal criminal investigation. But the SFO then also demanded that ENRC turn over all of the files and documents underpinning its report—including presentations given by the lawyers to ENRC’s management and the lawyers’ notes from their interviews with 184 potential witnesses.

ENRC refused to comply, claiming that these documents were covered by two legal privileges under UK law: the “litigation privilege,” which guarantees the confidentiality of documents created by lawyers for the “dominant purpose” of adversarial litigation (including prosecution) that is “in reasonable contemplation,” and the “legal advice privilege,” which protects communications between lawyers and clients exchanged for legal advice. The trial court rejected ENRC’s privilege claims, a decision that sent shockwaves through the English defense bar and spurred much criticism on legal and policy grounds. But the Court of Appeal reversed, holding that ENRC’s lawyers didn’t have to share the documents. The Court’s ruling relied on the litigation privilege, holding, first, that documents created to help avoid criminal prosecution counted as those created for the “dominant purpose” of litigation, and, second, that criminal legal proceedings were in “reasonable contemplation” for ENRC once the SFO contacted the company in 2011.

Many commentators have hailed the Appeal Court’s decision (which the SFO declined to appeal) as a “landmark ruling” and a “decisive victory” for defense lawyers. The reality is a bit more nuanced. The Court of Appeal’s fact-specific ruling was very conservative in its legal conclusions, and it’s unlikely that its holding regarding the litigation privilege is sufficient to create the right incentives for companies and their lawyers. It’s also unlikely that further judicial tinkering with the scope of the litigation privilege will resolve the problem promptly or satisfactorily. The better solution would involve a different institutional actor and a different privilege: Parliament should step in and expand the scope of the legal advice privilege to cover all communications between a company’s lawyers and the company’s current and former employees. Continue reading →

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

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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 →

Corporate Liability for Corruption in India: Some Notes on Reform

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Last month, the Indian legislature passed sweeping amendments to the Prevention of Corruption Act. If accepted in their present form, those amendments portend a major shift in India’s antiquated legal regime pursuing corporate criminal liability, making it much easier to go after corporations on corruption charges. (The amendments make other changes as well, which I have discussed elsewhere. Here, I only focus on the changes that would pertain to corporate liability for corruption offenses.) The amendments do make some welcome changes, but they do not go far enough to update India’s antiquated legal regime for corporate criminal liability. I’ll touch on three features of this regime and discuss how the new amendments do or do not effect significant changes. Continue reading →

Mixed Messages from the UK’s First Contested Prosecution for Failure to Prevent Bribery

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In February 2018, the UK secured its first ever contested conviction of a company for “failure to prevent bribery.” Under Section 7 of the UK Bribery Act (UKBA), a company or commercial organization faces liability for failing to prevent bribery if a person “associated with” the entity bribes another person while intending to obtain or retain business or “an advantage in the conduct of business” for that entity. Following an internal investigation, Skansen Interior Limited (SIL)—a 30-person furniture refurbishment contractor operating in southern England—discovered that an employee at its firm had agreed to pay nearly £40,000 in bribes to help the company win contracts worth £6 million. Company management fired two complicit employees and self-reported the matter to the National Crime Agency and the City of London police. The Crown Prosecution Service ultimately charged SIL with failing to prevent bribery under Section 7. Protesting its innocence, SIL argued that the company had “adequate procedures” in place at the time of the conduct to prevent bribery; SIL, in other words, sought to avail itself of the widely-discussed “compliance defense” in Section 7(2) of the UKBA, which allows a company to avoid liability for failing to prevent bribery if the company can show that it “had in place adequate procedures designed to prevent persons associated with [the company] from undertaking” the conduct in question.

The case proceeded to a jury trial. The verdict? Guilty. The sentence? None. In fact, SIL had been out of business since 2014, so the judge had no choice but to hand down an absolute discharge—wiping away the conviction.

The hollow nature of the government’s victory has led some commentators to call the prosecution “arguably unprincipled” or even a “mockery of the UK criminal process.” Indeed, the bribing employee and the bribed individual had already separately pleaded guilty to individual charges under UKBA Sections 1 and 2, respectively, and the remaining shell of a corporation had no assets or operations. Other commentators pointed out that precisely because the company was dormant it would have been unable to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA), lacking assets to pay financial penalties or compliance programs to improve. Putting aside arguments about the wisdom or fairness of pursuing a prosecution in these circumstances, the SIL case sheds light on Section 7(2)’s “adequate procedures” defense. While the UK government has secured a few DPAs for conduct under Section 7—beginning with Standard Bank Plc in 2015—SIL is the first case in which the Section 7(2) “adequate procedures” defense was tested in front of a jury.

While the government argued that it prosecuted the case primarily to send a message about the importance of anti-bribery compliance programs, the UK government’s actions in the SIL case ultimately sends mixed messages to companies and may have counterproductive effects. Continue reading →

Enlisting the Private Sector in the Fight Against Corruption — Part 2

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Part 1 of this post lists 21 countries plus the Canadian province of Quebec that have taken measures to get corporations to join the fight against corruption.  Thanks to a bad case of jet lag, the post’s author ran out of steam before explaining what he meant by a company’s “joining the fight” or how countries got them to join it.  Herewith an explanation of both along with my apologies to readers puzzled by part 1.

To begin, a table summarizing the laws to which part 1 referred along with summaries of bills pending in the Irish and Vietnamese legislatures appears here: National Compliance Rules.  (Thanks to readers who caught errors in the part 1 list; similar scrutiny of the table solicited.)

As the table shows, the laws referenced require — or provide incentives for — companies under their jurisdiction to prevent their employees from paying bribes or engaging in other forms of corrupt conduct.  Some laws prescribe in detail the elements such an anticorruption compliance program should contain; others leave it to regulations or the courts to decide what companies must do.  With the October 2016 publication of ISO 37001 setting standards for corporate antibribery programs, most authorities will likely converge around the elements it recommends.   The recommendations are sensible and quite consciously track the experience of those countries that required corporate compliance programs, especially the United States, where guidelines on what constitutes an “effective” compliance program, drafted to help courts when deciding the culpability of corporations for the corrupt acts of employees and agents, have been in force since 2004.

Where national corporate compliance laws differ is in how countries “encourage” companies subject to their laws to institute a compliance program. The table reveals several approaches. Continue reading →