Tag Archives: corporate culture

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 →

Why DOJ’s New FCPA Corporate Enforcement Policy May Be a Step Backwards

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At the end of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a new Corporate Enforcement Policy to guide prosecutors charged with overseeing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations. This new policy codifies, and builds on, the DOJ’s FCPA Pilot Program, which had been in place since mid-2016. Under the Pilot Program, the DOJ announced that it would consider mitigated penalties for companies that voluntarily disclosed FCPA violations, fully cooperated with the government investigation, and agreed to remediation measures. Those mitigated penalties included a reduction in penalties by 50% below the low end of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines range, or in some cases outright declination of prosecution.

The new Corporate Enforcement Policy goes further, stating that when a company voluntarily self-discloses an FCPA violation, fully cooperates, and adopts timely and appropriate remediation measures (including disgorgement of any gains from the violation), there is a presumption that the DOJ will offer the company a declination, absent aggravating circumstances (such as a particularly severe offense). This presumption of a declination is stronger than the Pilot Program, which only said that the DOJ would “consider” a declination. Additionally, while Pilot Program gave prosecutors the discretion to reduce requested fines, the new policy directs prosecutors to ask for lower fines as long as companies meet the requirements noted above. The new policy also gives favorable terms even to companies that do not voluntarily disclose misconduct, so long as they later fully cooperate and implement a remediation program. For these companies, the DOJ will recommend a sentence reduction of up to 25% off of the low end of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. (The DOJ also recently announced that it’s expanding this beyond the FCPA, applying it also to crimes such as securities fraud.)

One way to understand the new FCPA Corporate Enforcement Policy is as a response to concerns that the U.S. government’s traditional approach to enforcing the FCPA has over-emphasized corporate settlements at the expense of prosecuting individual wrongdoers. In that sense the new policy, and the Pilot Program before it, can be seen as consistent with the Yates Memo, which declared that the DOJ would focus more on individual liability. A related but distinct justification for the new Corporate Enforcement Policy is the idea that it will improve overall FCPA enforcement by encouraging more voluntary self-disclosures. The rationale is that there are likely a large number of low-level corporate bribery cases that companies learn about but don’t report, for fear of the expected penalties. The DOJ would prefer that companies disclose these transgressions, and the Department appears to have concluded that the benefits of encouraging such disclosures outweighs concerns about reducing punishments for FCPA violations. Indeed, in justifying the new enforcement policy, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein emphasized that under the Pilot Program, the number of voluntary disclosures during the program doubled to 30.

These justifications for the new policy at first seem plausible, but they suffer from an important flaw: They overlook the impact of DOJ’s enforcement posture on corporate culture. The new policy may increase incentives for voluntary self-disclosure and post hoc remediation, but at the same time the new policy weakens incentives for companies to actively work to promote a pro-integrity corporate culture. For that reason, the new policy may end up worsening overall foreign bribery activity, even if both corporate self-disclosures and prosecutions of individuals increase.

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Targeting Trump Businesses as a Response to Conflicts of Interest

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Many people, myself included, believe Donald Trump’s failure to place his assets in a blind trust is more than just problematic. The full extent to which President Trump may be abusing public power for private gain—that is, engaging in corruption—is unknowable, so long as his business empire remains opaque and his tax returns stay buried. Even where Trump’s business interests are out in the open, a “shadow of corruption” hangs over the actions he takes as an ostensible public servant.

Some of the people who share these concerns are exploring ways in which they might engage in consumer activism as a response to Trump’s conflicts of interest. Consider two organizations that are leading broad boycotts against the Trump Administration. Don’t Pay Trump is a web browser extension that allows one to, in their words, “keep your money out of Trump’s tiny hands.” It alerts the consumer when he or she is making an online purchase from a business that sells Trump products. A second initiative, #grabyourwallet, is a more established and exceedingly low-tech enterprise which also calls for “flexing consumer power.” #grabyourwallet maintains what looks like an excel spreadsheet that displays companies ripe for a Trump boycott. It provides the necessary tools to the activist consumer: name and number of the company, reason it should be boycotted, suggested sample of what to say, and updates on successes. #grabyourwallet received credit for the recent Nordstroms decision to drop Ivanka Trump’s produces from its stores, which earned Nordstroms a Presidential tweeted complaint on February 8th.

Both of these organizations attempt to decrease the profitability of Trump businesses, albeit for different reasons. Don’t Pay Trump seeks to weaponize consumer power to affect administration policy, while #grabyourwallet is explicitly motivated by the Trump family’s conflicts. It is difficult to say how effective the anti-Trump boycotts might be, given the absence of direct analogies to the current situation. Nonetheless, we might be able to draw some lessons from past corporate boycott efforts:

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