Tag Archives: OECD anti-bribery convention

Guest Post: A Pending Federal Case Could–and Should–Limit the FCPA’s Extraterritorial Reach

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Frederick Davis, a lawyer in the Paris office of Debevoise & Plimpton, who contributes the following guest post:

Can the U.S. government prosecute an individual for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations if that individual is not a U.S. citizen or resident, and committed no unlawful act in U.S. territory? An important case posing that question is now before a U.S. appeals court. The decision may have important implications on the territorial reach of the FCPA.

The facts and relevant statutory provisions are straightforward, although the analysis is not. The defendant, Lawrence Hoskins, is a British national who at all relevant times was an officer of a British subsidiary of French manufacturing giant Alstom. Alstom and several of its subsidiaries were investigated by the US Department of Justice for alleged illicit payments in Indonesia, and ultimately reached a global corporate settlement that included several corporate guilty pleas and Deferred Prosecution Agreements, pursuant to which the corporate entities paid US fines of over US$750 million. The DOJ also pursued several individuals, including Mr. Hoskins, who was ultimately arrested when he arrived in the United States on vacation. His attorneys moved to dismiss the indictment on the ground that the US prosecutor lacked power to prosecute him. After energetic procedural activity by both sides, the District Court granted his motion in significant part. Unusually, the prosecutor appealed, and oral argument was heard on March 2, 2017.

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Guest Post: Rolling Back Anticorruption

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Laurence Cockcroft, a founding board member of, and current advisor to, Transparency International, contributes today’s guest post:

The global campaign against corruption has become a cornerstone of Western foreign and development policy for the last 25 years. This campaign built on a number of earlier measures, most notably the 1977 enactment of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which criminalized foreign bribery by companies under US jurisdiction, but the campaign really accelerated beginning in the late 1990s. For example, while European countries had resisted adopting legislation similar to the FCPA for 20 years, this changed with the adoption of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in 1997, which was followed a few years later by the 2002 UN Convention Against Corruption. International financial institutions like the World Bank have become more aggressive about debarment of contractors found to have behaved corruptly, and we have also seen the proliferation of corporate-level ethical codes, promoted by organizations like the World Economic Forum and UN Global Compact, designed to prevent corrupt behavior.

More recent initiatives have pushed for greater corporate transparency. For example, in the United States, the Dodd-Frank Act ended the aggregation of corporate income across countries; an EU Directive promulgated shortly afterwards imposed similar requirements. More recently, an initiative to disclose the true beneficial owners of corporations and other legal entities, pushed by former British Prime Minister David Cameron, has already taken legislative form in the United Kingdom; beneficial ownership transparency is also the subject of an EU Directive, and was being promoted by the Obama administration. And although the so-called “offshore centers” have yet to embrace similar transparency of beneficial ownership, regulatory systems in these centers have been significantly improved. There have also been a number of important sector-level initiatives, particularly in the resources sector. These include the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI)—which requires participating governments of mineral and energy exporting countries, as well as companies in the extractive sector, to commit to a process of revenue transparency—as well as national-level laws, such as Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which impose so-called “publish what you pay” obligations on extractive firms.

Even more encouragingly, this gradually improving regulatory environment has been accompanied by growing public opposition to corruption, as reflected in large-scale demonstrations around the world. Crowds on the streets, for example, have recently supported the proposed prosecutions of the current and past Presidents of Brazil, and opposed weakening of anticorruption laws in Romania.

But in spite of public opinion, the forces opposed to anticorruption initiatives have never gone away. The arrival of President Trump has let many of them loose both inside and outside the United States: Continue reading →

Guest Post: The Case for Greater US Deference to Foreign Anticorruption Prosecutions–A Response to Maruca

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Frederick Davis, a lawyer in the Paris office of Debevoise & Plimpton, who contributes the following guest post:

Last fall, I published two posts in which I raised concerns about overlapping jurisdiction in foreign bribery cases, and about the appropriate role of US enforcement authorities in such cases. My first post noted that the US is not bound by the outcome of criminal processes in other countries, but can—and sometimes does—bring FCPA cases against foreign companies that have already resolved investigations for the same conduct brought initiated by their home countries. (As I also observed, the absence of any such constraint on US authorities creates an asymmetry with respect to countries that endorse an international ne bis in idem/double jeopardy bar, which can block such countries from pursuing a corporation or person that has already been pursued in the US.) My second post urged that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) should be more transparent in articulating when it will defer to non-US prosecutions in the corruption area.

A few weeks back, Michael Maruca posted an interesting critical commentary on my posts. The main thrust of Mr. Maruca’s very thoughtful comment was that the DOJ should not unnecessarily defer to non-US counterparts, partly because he worries about downgrading the effectiveness of US FCPA enforcement efforts, and partly because he envisions competition among national authorities as encouraging a “race to the top” in achieving optimal enforcement of foreign bribery laws. He proposes that the DOJ, rather than being more deferential to foreign resolutions of conduct that might violate the FCPA, the DOJ should go further in sharing the monetary outcomes of multinational investigations, and he provides commonsense principles for how it might do so.

Mr. Maruca’s intervention usefully advances the discussion on a very important issue. I agree with much of what he says. Nonetheless, I continue to view the lack of sufficient US deference to foreign resolutions of foreign bribery cases as a problem, and I have the following concerns about the points Mr. Maruca’s makes: Continue reading →

Equitable Sharing, Not Deference: How US FCPA Enforcers Should Accommodate Foreign Interests

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Frederick Davis recently published two guest posts (see here and here) emphasizing some of the risks that arise when the US government pursues FCPA prosecutions against foreign corporations. He notes that European anticorruption administrators are regularly irritated by aggressive US action in this field and by the apparent discrepancy in the treatment of US and non-US corporations. He also notes that foreign corporations are reasonably worried about being charged twice for the same transgression: While European countries have addressed this concern through an international version of the double jeopardy bar (also known as ne bis in idem), that bar does not protect a corporation against a subsequent US prosecution. Moreover, as Mr. Davis notes, US enforcement agencies (as compared to their counterparts in Europe) have wider authority to charge, are more willing to assert power abroad, wield more procedural tools, and are less subject to judicial supervision in their charging and settlement decisions. To address these problems, Mr. Davis recommends, among other measures, that the US DOJ issue guidelines for when to defer to foreign judgments.

However, US deference to foreign judgments may not be the best solution. It could be true, as Mr. Davis worries, that US prosecutors are “becoming the ultimate arbiters” of foreign bribery cases (at least those involving multinational corporations). But if the US standard is indeed more stringent, then US hegemony could lead to more aggressive anticorruption prosecution across the board, a boon for anticorruption advocates. Since in certain situations competition among administrative and enforcement agencies can create a de facto “race to the top” in terms of standards, it might not be such a good idea for the US to adopt a more deferential posture toward foreign judgments in transnational bribery cases.

That’s not to ignore the significant problems that Mr. Davis describes. Given that the fines and other monetary penalties for corrupt business behavior can be enormous, US FCPA counterparts in other nations would be rightly dismayed if they lost out on the potential recoveries. If a Danish corporation listed on a US exchange bribes an official in Gambia, all three countries should be able to penalize the wrongdoers and share—though not necessarily equally—in the fines and other penalties recovered. If the penalties are appropriately distributed, we need not sacrifice the aggressive anticorruption regime of US hegemony. My response to Mr. Davis is that we need guidelines for distribution of recoveries, not necessarily guidelines for deferral to foreign judgments operating under differing, and less aggressive, standards.

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Guest Post: Does International Law Require an International Double Jeopardy Bar?

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Frederick Davis, a lawyer in the Paris office of Debevoise & Plimpton, who contributes the following guest post:

Most countries prohibit multiple prosecutions for the same acts or offenses. This is known in the United States as the prohibition against “double jeopardy”; in Europe and elsewhere the principle is known as ne bis in idem. But what happens if a person or company is pursued in more than one country? This question is particularly relevant to the fight against foreign bribery, where the same act will often offend the criminal laws of multiple countries. The OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, adopted in 1997, clearly anticipated the possibility of multi-state prosecutions, but provided in Article 4.3 only that the relevant authorities should “consult with a view to determining the most appropriate jurisdiction for prosecution,” a provision that has been consistently interpreted as precatory, not providing an individual right against double prosecution.

The law in the United States provides no protection against duplicate prosecution by a different sovereign. The situation is more complex in Europe. In some countries, such as France, domestic legislation limits a prosecutor’s power to pursue a person or entity already the object of a prosecution in another country, but only if the exercise of French jurisdiction is “extraterritorial” (that is, where no constitutive act of the alleged crime took place on French territory, but the prosecution based on some other factor, such as the French nationality of the accused or the victim).  Within Europe, a series of overlapping treaties—Protocol Number 7 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (CPHRFF), adopted in 1984 by the Council of Europe and signed by most but not all of its members; Article 54 of the Convention to Implement the Schengen Agreement (CISA), adopted in 1990; and Article 50 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFR) adopted in 2009—all contain ne bis in idem provisions, though they are not identical. (The CISA provision, for example, protects against re-prosecution based on the same “acts,” while the CFR and CPHRFF protect against multiple prosecutions for the same “offense.”)  The CISA provision has been expansively interpreted by the European Court of Justice, which has noted that CISA mandates a “mutual trust” in the criminal justice systems of other signatory countries, and respect for their decisions “even when the outcome would be different if [the second country’s] own national law were applied.”

Lurking behind these and other developments in Europe is the possibility that protection against multiple prosecutions may one day be viewed as right, grounded in international treaty obligations, that is cognizable under domestic constitutions. No court has yet so ruled, but there are sufficient intimations of such a possibility in some French decisions, for example, that the issue is frequently raised there. Continue reading →

The Case for Corporate Settlements in Foreign Bribery Cases

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Although 41 countries have signed onto the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, the United States remains the most active enforcer—by a lot. Two salient facts about the U.S. strategy for enforcing its Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) are often noted: Sanctions against corporations are more common than cases targeting individuals, and most of these corporate cases are resolved by settlements—often pre-indictment diversionary agreements known as deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and non-prosecution agreements (NPAs). Both of these facts are sometimes exaggerated a bit: According to the OECD’s most recent composite data (for enforcement actions from 1999-2014), the U.S. imposed sanctions on 58 individuals (compared to 92 corporations or other legal persons), and of those 92 legal persons sanctioned, 57 reached a settlement via a DPA or NPA (meaning that 35 of them were sanctioned through a post-indictment plea agreement or—much more rarely—a trial). Still, it’s true that the U.S. enforcement strategy makes extensive use of pre-indictment settlements with corporate defendants, and that fact has attracted its share of criticism.

While most of that criticism (at least in the FCPA context) has come from the corporate defense bar and others opposed to aggressive FCPA enforcement, the use of DPAs/NPAs has been questioned by anticorruption advocates as well. Recently, the UK-based anticorruption NGO Corruption Watch (CW) published a report entitled “Out of Court, Out of Mind: Do Deferred Prosecution Agreements and Corporate Settlements Fail To Deter Overseas Corruption”; shortly thereafter, CW, along with several other leading NGOs (Global Witness, Transparency International, and the UNCAC Coalition) sent a letter to the OECD expressing “concern that the increasing use of corporate settlements in the way they are currently implemented as the primary means for resolving foreign bribery cases may not offer ‘effective, proportionate and disuasive’ sanctions as required under the Convention,” and “urg[ing] the OECD Working Group on Bribery to develop as a matter of priority global standards for corporate settlements based on best practice.” Last week, here on GAB, CW’s policy director Susan Hawley provide a succinct summary of the case for greater skepticism of the practice of resolving foreign bribery cases through DPAs/NPAs, and the need for some sort of global standard.

I disagree. While I have the utmost respect for Corruption Watch and the other NGOs that sent the joint letter to the OECD, and I sympathize with many of their concerns, I find most of the criticisms of the DPA/NPA mechanism, particularly as deployed by U.S. authorities in FCPA cases, wide of the mark. I also remain unconvinced that there is a pressing need for “global standards” for corporate settlement practices, and indeed I think that pushing for such standards may raise a host of problems. These issues—whether DPAs/NPAs are sufficiently effective sanctions, and whether we need common global standards regulating their use—are quite different, so I will address them separately. In this post, I will respond to the main criticisms of the U.S. practice of using DPAs/NPAs to resolve FCPA cases, focusing on the concerns emphasized in the CW report. In my next post, I will turn to the question whether the OECD, the UN Convention Against Corruption, or some other international agreement or body ought to try to establish global standards regulating the use of corporate settlements.

So, what’s wrong with the analysis in the CW critique of corporate settlements? Lots of things—so many that it’s hard to know where to begin. But before turning to my criticisms, it’s worth starting out by re-stating some of the main reasons why it might make sense to resolve some anti-bribery cases via corporate settlements: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Time for Global Standards on Corporate Settlements in Transnational Bribery Cases

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Susan Hawley, Policy Director of Corruption Watch, a UK-based anticorruption organization, contributes the following guest post:

Earlier this month, the OECD held a Ministerial meeting on its Anti-Bribery Convention, which culminated with Ministers from 50 countries signing a Declaration that reaffirmed their commitment to fighting transnational bribery. Despite that statement of renewed commitment, however, the fact remains that only four countries out of the 41 signatories have shown any attempt at actively enforcing the Convention, and pressure is rightly mounting on countries to show they are taking some kind of action. As a result, an increasing number of countries are looking to deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs), non-prosecution agreements (NPAs), and similar forms of pre-indictment corporate settlements as a way to achieve better results. The United States—by far the most active enforcer of its law against foreign bribery—has used such agreements to produce its impressive enforcement record over the last 10 years. The OECD Foreign Bribery Report noted that 69% of foreign bribery cases have been resolved through some form of settlement since 1999. And it’s not just the US. Various European countries have used some form of out-of-court settlement procedure as a way of dealing with the few cases against companies that they have brought. The UK has recently introduced DPAs, based on the U.S. model (though with some important differences), and countries like Australia, France, Ireland, and Canada are all considering doing something similar.

Yet the widespread use of DPAs and NPAs has prompted concerns. The OECD Working Group on Bribery, in its reviews on implementation of the Convention, has sometimes questioned whether these settlements are sufficiently transparent and effective, and whether they instill public confidence. My own organization, Corruption Watch, recently produced a report on corporate settlements in foreign bribery cases, “Out of Court, Out of Mind: Do Deferred Prosecution Agreements and Corporate Settlements Fail to Deter Overseas Corruption?” that raised similar questions. Corruption Watch, along with Global Witness, Transparency International, and the UNCAC Coalition (a network of over 350 civil society organisations across the world) wrote a joint letter to the OECD Secretary General ahead of the Ministerial meeting urging the Working Group on Bribery to assess whether corporate settlements have sufficient deterrent effect, and to develop global standards for corporate settlements in foreign bribery cases.

Why the need for greater scrutiny, and the call for global standards? Several reasons:

  • First, these sorts of settlements allow culpable individuals off the hook, undermine the deterrent effect of the law by shielding companies from debarment from public contracting, and more generally fail to deter economic crime and prevent recidivism. The concern is that the fines and other penalties associated with DPAs/NPAs are just seen by firms a “cost of doing business,” rather than an impetus for meaningful change. Recent research by Karpoff, Lee, and Martin (discussed previously on this blog) suggests that in the US, which has imposed the highest fines and taken the most enforcement actions globally, detection would have to increase by 58.5% or fines increase by 9.2 times to offset the incentive to bribe. Indeed, there are signs that the U.S., despite having relied so extensively on diversionary corporate settlements, has recognized some of these weaknesses: The introduction of the Yates memo, with its emphasis on individual accountability, and the beefing up of the FBI’s resources for investigating corruption (and thus reducing the government’s reliance on corporate self-reporting), are examples of how the U.S. is taking note of the criticism of its reliance on DPAs and NPAs.
  • Second, in addition to their inadequacy for deterring foreign bribery, in many countries the negotiation of corporate settlements lacks adequate regulation or oversight.
  • Third, these corporate settlement agreements rarely provide any sort of compensation for victims of corruption.
  • Fourth, clear discrepancies are emerging about how different countries use corporate settlements to deal with foreign bribery, creating an uneven enforcement playing field.

Proponents of settlements argue that they are necessary because corruption cases are incredibly difficult and costly to investigate and prosecute; unless enforcement authorities encourage companies to come forward with evidence of their wrongdoing, the argument goes, enforcement rates will remain low and corruption will go undetected. Clearly encouraging companies, who often hold all the information required as to whether wrongdoing was committed, to report their own wrongdoing by offering some form of incentive needs to be a part of any enforcement strategy. But there are serious questions as to whether relying solely on settlements to deal with foreign bribery cases can provide real deterrence. Unless enforcement bodies beef up their ability to detect corruption and are willing to prosecute, there is little incentive for companies to report wrongdoing that they might otherwise get away with.

So what would global standards for corporate settlements look like? The NGOs’ joint letter to the OECD, referenced above, suggested 14 standards to the OECD. At the top of the agenda were the following:

  1. Settlements should be one tool in a broader enforcement strategy in which prosecution also plays an important role;
  2. Settlements should only be used where a company has genuinely self-reported, and cooperated fully;
  3. Judicial oversight which includes proper scrutiny of the evidence and a public hearing should be required;
  4. Prosecution of individuals should be standard practice;
  5. Settlements should only be used where a company is prepared to admit wrongdoing;
  6. Compensation to victims, based on the full harm caused by the corruption, must be an inherent part of a settlement.

These are high standards, but unless settlements are based on such standards, and unless they are used as part of a broader enforcement strategy which ensures that companies that don’t cooperate or self-report do get prosecuted, public confidence that justice is really being done when it comes to corporate bribery is going to be undermined.

France’s Failure to Fight Foreign Bribery: The Problem is Procedure

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When it comes to effective implementation of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, France is the black sheep of the herd. In 2012, the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery’s Phase 3 Report praised France’s efforts to enact an adequate legal framework, but expressed concerns on the low number of convictions. Two years later, the Working Group reiterated its concerns that France was insufficiently compliant with the Anti-Bribery Convention, and the EU’s 2014 Anti-Corruption Report expressed similar worries. In 2015, Transparency International placed France in the category of “limited enforcer” and has stated that France had failed to prosecute foreign bribery cases efficiently. Indeed, in the 16+ years since the OECD Convention came into force, no companies have ever been convicted in France for foreign bribery, and only seven individuals have been found guilty. The only French-led conviction against a company–Safran–was overturned on appeal last January. Even in this case, on appeal, the prosecution did not seek the conviction of the corporation, stating that the conditions to corporate criminal liability were not met (the court of appeal did not rule on that specific issue, and overturned the conviction on factual grounds).

The low number of French convictions for foreign bribery offenses is not due to the fact that French corporations do not bribe. In fact, a recent study on purchasing activities in the private sector showed that 25% of the Chief Purchasing Officers in France have been offered bribes by other French companies. And French companies have often been penalized by more aggressive enforcers, particularly the United States, when they have jurisdiction. (Most recently, Alstom agreed to pay a $772 million fine for violating the U.S. FCPA by bribing officials in several countries.) While some in France have grumbled about U.S. overreach, others in France share the views of the President of Transparency International France, who declared (in reference to cases like Alstom), “It’s humiliating for everyone in France that our judiciary is not capable of doing the work themselves”.

Why is France such a laggard with respect to its enforcement obligations under the OECD Convention? The issue is not France’s domestic legislation criminalizing foreign bribery, which is more than adequate. The real issue resides in France’s failure to enforce these laws. And the explanation for this lies not in France’s substantive criminal law on corruption, but rather in a number of important aspects of French criminal procedure and prosecutorial practices. Continue reading →

Can the OECD Convention Prevent FCPA Backsliding?

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A little while back I expressed some concern (perhaps excessive) about the possibility that we might be seeing a revitalized movement to “reform” (that is, weaken) the FCPA; I also worried a bit that a greater focus on prosecutions of individuals might lead to judicial rulings that would force the government to substantially narrow its reading of the statute (for example, with respect to the definition of “foreign official,” or what counts as “anything of value,” or the scope of statutory jurisdiction, or other matters where the statute itself is arguably ambiguous). In response to the latter concern, Duke Law Professor Rachel Brewster raised an intriguing possibility (in addition to several other reasonable responses to my worries): The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, she suggested, might limit the degree to which the U.S. Congress or courts narrow or limit the FCPA. As Professor Brewster succinctly put the point in her comment on one of my earlier posts:

[T]he OECD treaty … is even broader than the FCPA. Moreover, the courts of appeal that have ruled on the meaning of the FCPA (Kay, Esqenazi) have explicitly relied on the more robust OECD treaty provisions to support the government’s position. That gives me some comfort that the US court system is going to continue to support the DOJ/SEC’s current enforcement strategy. Even if the OECD treaty does not explicit answer questions like “who is a foreign official” and “what is anything of value” (although it does help with the narrow interpretation of the facilitating payments), the general tenor of the treaty (and subsequent treaties the US has backed and joined) supports the government’s strong enforcement approach.

This is a valuable point, and to a certain extent I agree. But I am less sanguine than Professor Brewster that the OECD Convention will prove much of a firewall against a potential congressional or judicial backlash against the DOJ and SEC’s aggressive approach to interpreting and enforcing the statute. Continue reading →

A Trade-Anticorruption Breakthrough?: The Trans-Pacific Partnership’s Transparency and Anticorruption Chapter

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The full text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), released earlier this month, is already generating plenty of discussion. One of the proposed agreement’s most striking features is the full chapter on transparency and anticorruption, Chapter 26. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) had earlier stated that its objectives in negotiating the TPP included addressing transparency, accountability, and corruption; at the time I thought this was simply a negotiating ploy or marketing strategy, but it looks like I was wrong. As USTR’s summary of the “good governance” steps of Chapter 26 correctly notes, the TPP “includes the strongest anti-corruption and transparency standards of any trade agreement.” Indeed, Chapter 26–which appears to modeled in part on draft language that Transparency International had proposed for inclusion in a different trade deal, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership–could mark an important and unprecedented step towards using trade agreements to promoting and harmonize international anticorruption efforts.

Here are a few points that are or could be particularly important features of Chapter 26:

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