Today’s guest post is from Senior Legal Analyst Sandrine Hannedouche-Leric, together with Legal Analysts Elisabeth Danon and Brooks Hickman, of the OECD Anti-Corruption Division.

 In December 2016, Brazilian, Swiss, and US authorities announced that the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht would pay a combined fine of USD 3.5 billion as part of a coordinated resolution of foreign bribery allegations—the largest foreign bribery resolution in history. Like many foreign bribery cases concluded in the last decade, the Odebrecht case was resolved outside a courtroom. In fact, non-trial resolutions, also referred to as settlements, have been the predominant means of enforcing foreign bribery and other related offences since the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention entered into force 20 years ago.

The OECD Working Group on Bribery recently published a report on Resolving Foreign Cases with Non-Trial Resolutions. The report develops a typology of the various non-trial resolution systems used by Parties to the Convention, and sheds light on the operation and effectiveness of these systems. It also looks at the challenges they raise for law enforcement authorities, companies and other stakeholders in the resolution process. The data collected for the Study confirms and quantifies the widely-recognized fact that settlement, rather than trial is the dominant mechanism for resolving foreign bribery cases. The report finds that close to 80% of the almost 900 foreign bribery cases concluded since the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention came into force have been concluded through non-trial resolutions, and among the three most active enforcers of foreign anti-bribery laws—the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom—this percentage rises to 96%. Non-trial resolutions have been responsible for approximately 95% of the USD 14.9 billion (adjusted to 2018 constant US dollars) collected from legal persons sanctioned to date. Additionally, the report finds that coordinated multi-jurisdictional non-trial resolutions have been on the rise over the past decade. Such coordination, which would not be possible through trial proceedings, has permitted the imposition of the highest global amount of combined financial penalties in foreign bribery cases. Eight of the ten largest foreign bribery enforcement actions involved coordinated or sequential non-trial resolutions involving at least two Parties to the Convention.

The study was launched last month during the OECD Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum, in a panel discussion moderated by the Head of the World Bank’s Integrity Compliance Unit. Building on the Study’s key findings, law enforcement officials from Brazil, France, the United Kingdom and the United States discussed the challenges associated with non-trial resolutions based on their first-hand experience, and explained why the use of these instruments will likely continue to grow in the future. In particular, they discussed how non-trial instruments can help overcome procedural hurdles and fundamental differences between legal systems and cultures, and thus facilitate cross-country coordination in the resolution of foreign bribery cases. (The video of the session is accessible online. See the section “Watch Live” for Room 1 starting at 8:13:00).