Tag Archives: individual prosecutions

Brazil: A Model for International Cooperation in Foreign Bribery Prosecutions

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Much ink has been spilled celebrating the extraordinary crackdown on corruption in Brazil over the past few years (including on this blog). Headlined by the massive Operation Car Wash (Portuguese: Lava Jato)—in which officials received nearly $3 billion in bribes to overcharge Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, for construction and service work—high-profile corruption investigations have swept through Brazil, threatening to upend its reputation as a bastion for unchecked graft. Although corruption in Brazil remains a serious problem, the extensive investigations have worked to elevate the nation as an inspiration for countries looking to address their own corrupt political systems and hoping to become “the next Brazil.”

In addition to the headline-grabbing investigations targeting the upper echelons of the Brazilian government, Brazilian authorities have also worked closely with U.S. authorities investigating bribery activity in Brazil, leading to significant penalties both under Brazilian law and under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). This is a significant development, because it demonstrates the possibility for close collaboration on cross-border bribery cases between a developed country (usually on the “supply side” of transnational bribery cases) and a developing country (on the “demand side”). Commentators have complained that too often supply-side enforcers like the United States take an outsized role in transnational bribery cases, with the countries where the bribery takes place doing too little. Other commentators have cautioned that an increase in prosecutions by other countries, in the absence of some sort of global coordination mechanism, may lead to races to prosecution or to over-enforcement. China’s nearly $500 million fine of British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline in 2014 for bribing Chinese doctors and hospitals was emblematic of these fears, providing an example of an aggressive, unilateral approach to demand-side enforcement – while putting DOJ in the unfamiliar position of pursuing FCPA violations as a cop late to the scene.

Through its recent enforcement actions, Brazil has provided a different model. While there have been successful joint enforcement actions in the past—such as the Siemens case—the recent series of coordinated U.S.-Brazil actions exhibit how developed and developing countries can work together in anti-bribery enforcement, sharing in the investigative responsibilities, negotiations with companies, and even the financial returns.

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Should FCPA Enforcers Focus on Bribe-Paying Employees or Their Corporate Employers?

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These days most (though not all) resolutions in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases involve corporate defendants paying fines or other penalties to the government. Usually (again, not always) the government does not bother prosecuting the employees who paid the bribes. (While the government has recently made individual liability in corporate criminal cases more of a point of emphasis — as exemplified by the DOJ’s Yates Memo, which Danielle discussed in yesterday’s post — the targets in those cases are typically senior executives who orchestrated bribe-paying schemes, not the lower-level executives or employees who actually paid the bribes.) The government also uses various legal tools to encourage lower-level employees blow the whistle on their employers.

Do we have this backwards? Right now, the government focuses its enforcement efforts on the corporate employers, rather than the lower-level employees who pay the bribes. Should the government instead emphasize enforcement actions against the employees? Right now, the government tries to give employees incentives to uncover and disclose evidence of FCPA violations committed by their employers. Should the government instead focus on encouraging the employers to uncover and disclose FCPA violations committed by their employees?

This past summer, I was fortunate enough to attend the Third Annual Conference on Evidence-Based Anti-Corruption Policies in Bangkok, and the keynote speaker at that event, New York University Law Professor Jennifer Arlen, made a case along those lines. (Professor Arlen’s address was actually a much more wide-ranging discussion of corporate criminal liability; I’ve extracted, and possibly oversimplified or distorted, one thread of her argument. But it’s an interesting enough argument that I think it’s worth engaging, and I’ll focus on the simple version, even though her position is more nuanced.) The argument goes something like this: The DOJ should adopt a policy that any corporation that discovers FCPA violations by its employees, and then promptly (a) discloses the violation to the government, (b) provides the government with information, and (c) assists the government in prosecuting the employee, should be exempt from corporate criminal liability for the violation; the DOJ should instead vigorously prosecute the individual employees in this situation (using the evidence that the corporate employer has itself provided). If the corporation fails to promptly disclose such a violation, however, and the government subsequently finds out about it, the corporation should be held criminally liable for the FCPA violation, and penalized accordingly.

I think this proposal is interesting enough to take seriously, though in the end I remain unconvinced that this shift in emphasis would be a good idea. Let me first lay out the argument in favor of this change, and then explain why I ultimately disagree. Continue reading →

Individual FCPA Liability: A Risky Proposition for FCPA Enforcement Proponents?

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Both supporters and skeptics of aggressive enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act have criticized the fact that the act is enforced much more often against corporations than against individuals. Some critics of FCPA enforcement often assert that it is unfair for the government to insist on corporations acknowledging criminal liability when the government is unwilling or unable to prosecute the individuals who committed the actual crimes. At the same time, supporters of aggressive FCPA enforcement argue that the failure to hold individuals personally liable, and to impose criminal penalties (including prison time) on those culpable actors undermines the FCPA’s deterrent effect. And they have a point: many doubt that fines and other monetary sanctions on corporations—at least at the levels that can be imposed under the FCPA—are sufficient to deter bribery, and there is evidence to support this claim.

Of course, individual FCPA liability is hardly novel; a number of past FCPA cases have included criminal convictions of individual company employees. But many have called for dramatically ramping up focus on individuals, and there are some signs that the U.S. Department of Justice may be heeding those calls. For someone like me, who tends to think that FCPA enforcement needs to be even more robust, this would seem like welcome news. And for the most part it is… but I do have a nagging worry, which may be entirely groundless, but that I want to try to flesh out in this post. The worry goes something like this: Continue reading →