Tag Archives: OECD anti-bribery convention

Are Less Corrupt Countries More Faithful Enforcers of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention?

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The failure of many signatories to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention to enforce their new laws against the bribery of foreign public officials has been widely noted, including on this blog. There is no single factor that explains this lack of enforcement across the 30 or so countries (out of 41 total signatories) that have not yet seriously begun enforcing their anti-bribery laws. However, there is a fair amount of descriptive evidence about the extent to which signatories actually do so: Transparency International (TI) has, for the last nine years, released annual reports on progress, which provide a good deal of information on this level.

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The OECD Convention and Extraterritorial FCPA Jurisdiction

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I suggested in an earlier post that a major reason for the increase in foreign anti-bribery prosecutions in other countries since the passage of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention is increased enforcement of the FCPA against foreign companies by the US government. In this post, I will set out, in a little more depth, one factor that contributed to bringing this effect about, namely a broadened scope for enforcement jurisdiction under §78dd-3 of the FCPA.

An important effect of the entry into force of the OECD Convention was that it provided “cover” for expansive US enforcement of the FCPA. Equally important, though, was the contribution it made in providing the legal means by which the US Department of Justice was actually able to undertake this expansion. Broader enforcement has helped to push standards for anti-bribery enforcement into convergence around the world, and has encouraged other countries to start enforcing their own laws more seriously.

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Improving OECD Convention Enforcement While Respecting Voluntariness: The Case for an Optional Protocol

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Jordan recently floated a very interesting idea on this blog about how to move forward in strengthening enforcement of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. As he pointed out, the Convention itself allows extremely limited means of enforcement: other than shaming noncompliant countries with scathing reports, there’s nothing that can be done within the existing framework. Since changing the Convention to include new sanctions is a nonstarter because noncompliant nations would need to accede to those changes, he suggested that willing members of the Convention “[d]evelop an extra-Convention agreement” to reward countries that live up to the terms of the Convention and “impose collateral consequences upon those who don’t.” The upshot of this extra-Convention agreement is that it would allow states to punish and pressure countries like South Africa, which has resisted the shaming effects of the Convention’s reports.

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The FCPA’s “Facilitating Payments” Exception: Mostly Harmless

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The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) contains a sweeping prohibition on paying bribes to foreign officials—but also contains an exception for so-called “facilitating payments” (also sometimes called “grease payments”) meant to secure non-discretionary “routine government action.” The exception was included in the FCPA to respond to complaints by representatives of the U.S. business community that it was impossible to do business in certain countries without making these “grease payments” to low-level bureaucrats. The exception has been criticized—occasionally by those who think that the exemption is too narrow and should be expanded (or, to use their preferred euphemism, “clarified”), but more recently by a growing chorus of voices that has called for the elimination of the FCPA’s facilitation payments exception. This chorus has included, perhaps most prominently, the OECD’s Working Group on Bribery (responsible for the peer-review process under the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention), along with several of the OECD’s senior officials. And, notably, more recent foreign bribery legislation—most prominently the UK Bribery Act—contains no exception for facilitating payments. Possibly for this reason, at several recent international anticorruption conferences I’ve attended, participants (especially from outside the U.S.) have asked whether (or when) the U.S. will eliminate the grease payment exemption.

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Encouraging More Corruption-Related Litigation?

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On June 28 the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict and the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative will, with the help of this writer, host a one-day conference at the Said Business School entitled Legal Remedies for Corruption to discuss ways civil society can stimulate corruption-related litigation – either by pressuring prosecutors to file more criminal cases or by bringing their own civil actions for damages.

The question mark in the title is for American readers who might be forgiven for asking why such a conference is necessary.  Isn’t there enough litigation already? The U.S. Department of Justice and Securities & Exchange Commission continue to vigorously enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, while the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section continues to ferret out corrupt federal, state, and local officials.  In 2012, the last year for which data is available, the section charged more than 1,000 individuals with accepting bribes, criminal conflict of interest, and other corruption offenses. And private parties in the U.S. have also been willing to sue alleged bribe payers, with suits brought by a range of injured parties including competitors, suppliers, partners, shareholders, and employee-whistleblowers.  Even foreign governments have taken advantage of American law’s broad standing rules and generous theories of damages: One alleged bribe payer recently paid a company owned by the Government of Bahrain $85 million to settle a claim it had harmed the company by bribing one of its employees to secure a contract, while the government of Trinidad has brought an action under Florida’s version of the Racketeer and Corrupt Organizations Act against the companies that allegedly rigged bids on an airport construction project in Port of Spain.

It turns out that while there is a great deal of litigation — public and private — over bribery allegations in the United States, this is much less true in most of the rest of the world. Continue reading →

U.S. v. Esquenazi: Some Knee-Jerk Reactions

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As those who follow the world of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement are no doubt well aware, earlier this week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit decided U.S. v. Esquenazi. The decision affirmed the convictions of two individuals involved in a complicated scheme to bribe officials of Teleco, the Hatian state-owned telecommunications company. Though the appeal involved several issues, the most significant aspect of the case–and the reason it had been so closely followed by so many people–was the defendants’ claim that Teleco was not an “instrumentality” of the Hatian government, and therefore that the Teleco employees whom the defendants bribed were not “foreign officials” within the meaning of the FCPA. Though several district courts had considered (and rejected) claims of this sort before, Esquenazi was the first court of appeals decision to address such a claim.  And, like all of the prior district court cases, the court rejected the defendant’s argument and found that Teleco was indeed an instrumentality of the Hatian government.

Though I’m not sure there’s all that much to say about this that hasn’t already been said, let me make four quick observations about the decision and its potential significance (or lack thereof):

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Corruption and Shame in South Africa: Lessons from Current Events

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In his recent post, Jordan noted that the OECD Working Group on Bribery recently approved a “scathing” report on South Africa’s noncompliance with the Anti-Bribery Convention. He described group members’ frustration at hitting “a brick wall” as their criticisms fail to effect any change in South Africa. Noting that the Convention’s primary mechanism of enforcing compliance is shame created by critical reports, Jordan asked the very important and provocative question: “What if shame isn’t enough?” A future post will explore an option that might exist for changing, expanding, or enforcing the Convention, but there’s a prior, empirical question: How is the shame mechanism working so far? Continue reading →

What if Shame Isn’t Enough: The OECD and a Noncompliant South Africa

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Matthew recently expressed skepticism about proposals to expand the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention to countries like China and India.  As he explained, adding new parties may undermine the peer review system that is key to the Convention’s success.  To succeed, that system requires (in Matthew’s words) that “(1) countries are willing to issue harsh reports about their peers, and (2) countries care about the reports, and find bad reviews embarrassing and/or politically damaging.” But what if public shaming isn’t enough?  Imagine that a member state didn’t care enough to change its ways after critical reports.  What would be next?  Unfortunately, South Africa might help answer that question soon.

Last month, the OECD Working Group on Bribery (“WGB”) issued a scathing Phase 3 Report on South Africa’s compliance with the Convention.  As the FCPA Blog recounted, the OECD appeared to have “encountered a brick wall,” with the reviewing nations “repeatedly express[ing] exasperation with South Africa’s failure . . . to prosecute a single foreign bribery case.”  Calling the need for enforcement “imperative,” the WGB insisted that South Africa take “urgent steps” to address a host of infirmities; among other problems, the WGB found that South Africa had allowed political and economic considerations to impede investigations by the nation’s under-resourced anticorruption unit.  The OECD also took the unusual steps of (1) asking South Africa to submit a self-assessment and (2) threatening to “take appropriate measures,” including requiring an additional Phase 3bis review, to address South Africa’s continued compliance problems.

With South Africa’s ruling party under increasing fire for its failure to combat corruption, the nation’s 2014 elections could mark a turning point in South Africa’s antibribery efforts.  But what if they don’t?  What if continuing to embarrass South Africa through follow-on reports and a statement of noncompliance isn’t enough to jumpstart enforcement of the Convention in Africa’s largest economy?

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Going After the Bribe Takers: Step One

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Last week I wrote about the gap between prosecutions for transnational bribe paying and transnational bribe taking.  Even after a bribe payer in one state has been convicted or pled guilty, most countries where the bribe was paid have shown little interest in investigating who took the bribe – an often easy inquiry given the evidence unearthed in the bribe payer case.  I also noted that in almost every instance the bribe was paid by a firm in an OECD country to a government official in a developing state.

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The OECD Bribery Convention as Cover for US FCPA Enforcement Abroad

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Both Rick and Matthew’s posts earlier this week discussed the effectiveness of the 1997 OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in combating international corruption. Rick emphasizes the Convention’s success in prosecuting supply-side bribery, noting the hundreds of convictions and settlements since the Convention came into force. But as Matthew pointed out, and as the OECD itself has acknowledged, the impressive-sounding aggregate enforcement numbers mask the fact that enforcement is highly unevenly distributed: the majority of the Convention’s 40 member countries still do not enforce their anti-bribery laws effectively (if at all)–and most of the increase in enforcement that Rick highlights comes has come not from the countries that recently adopted extraterritorial anti-bribery laws, but from the United States, which has had such a law – the FCPA – on the books for more than 35 years.

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