Tag Archives: OECD

New Podcast Episode, Featuring Nicola Bonucci

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A new episode of KickBack: The Global Anticorruption Podcast is now available. In this week’s episode, I interview Nicola Bonucci, currently a partner with the Paul Hastings law firm, who served for many years as the Director of Legal Affairs for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Our interview focuses primarily on the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Officials in International Business Transactions (sometimes referred to simply as the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention), which Mr. Bonucci was involved in creating and implementing. We discuss the history behind the convention, the reasons for its (relative) success, and also some of its current shortcomings. We also explore some of the current questions and challenges for this convention, including whether large emerging economies (such as China) ought to be brought into the convention, and how to enforce the convention’s requirement that enforcement of foreign anti-bribery laws shouldn’t be influenced by political or national economic considerations. Near the end of our talk, Mr. Bonucci reflects on his new perspective working with private clients addressing foreign bribery issues. You can also find both this episode and an archive of prior episodes at the following locations: KickBack is a collaborative effort between GAB and the ICRN. If you like it, please subscribe/follow, and tell all your friends! And if you have suggestions for voices you’d like to hear on the podcast, just send me a message and let me know.

ASIL/World Bank/OECD Symposium on Supranational Responses to Corruption–Call for Papers

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The Anti-Corruption Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law (ACLIG), the World Bank’s Office of Suspension and Debarment (OSD), and the OECD’s Anti-Corruption Division are organizing a symposium on “Supranational Responses to Corruption,” tentatively planned to be held in person in Vienna, Austria on November 18-19, 2021, with the possibility to participate remotely. The theme of the symposium–which is described in greater detail here–is “supranational responses to corruption.” In other words, the symposium will focus on current and prospective anticorruption efforts that transcend national boundaries or governments. Themes of this symposium may include, but are not limited to:

  • Efforts that can transcend national boundaries or governments structures when it comes to generating and operationalizing anticorruption policies and measures undertaken by intergovernmental organizations, regional organizations, institutional investors, donors, and private sector firms;
  • Efforts to establish regional/global investigative, prosecutorial, and adjudicatory anticorruption institutions;
  • Efforts to enhance coordination and collaboration among the actors undertaking anticorruption efforts at the international level.

The organizers are inviting proposals for both full papers (minimum 5,000 words) and short essays (minimum 2,500 words) from scholars, private sector professionals, international organizations professionals, policymakers, public officials, civil society organizations, and the broader international anti-corruption community. The deadline to submit a proposal is May 15, 2021 (a month from today). A proposal should be between 250 and 500 words, and should indicate how the proposed paper or essay relates to the themes of the symposium. To submit a proposal, you should send it (together with a brief biographical statement) to acsymposium2021@gmail.com. Successful applicants will be informed by June13, and the deadline for submitting the full paper or essay will be September 25, 2021.

This sounds like a great event on an important set of topics, so I hope that many of you will consider submitting proposals!

The OECD Rightly Rejects Claims that U.S. FCPA Enforcement Is Improperly Politicized

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Earlier this month, the OECD Working Group on Bribery released its Phase 4 Report on U.S. compliance with the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. For those readers unfamiliar with the process, this report is part of the peer monitoring system that the OECD Convention establishes for promoting adherence to the Convention. (The Convention lacks “hard” sanctions, though in extreme cases it’s possible a country could be expelled. Rather, the Convention relies on “soft” peer pressure, facilitated through the extensive and detailed investigations and reports carried out by the Working Group.) The lengthy and detailed report, produced under the leadership of experts from the UK and Argentina, assesses U.S. performance on a range of issues related to the prevention and prosecution of foreign bribery. For purposes of this post, I want to zero in on one narrow but important issue, which gets just over a couple of pages in the report: whether U.S. enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) is improperly influenced by national political or economic interests.

This question is important, both legally and politically. As a legal matter, Article 5 of the OECD Convention explicitly states that decisions regarding the investigation and prosecution of foreign bribery offenses “shall not be influenced by considerations of national economic interest, the potential effect upon relations with another State or the identity of the natural or legal persons involved.” The OECD has in the past raised concerns about Article 5 violations by other member states, including the United Kingdom, and, more recently, Turkey and Canada. More broadly, as a political matter critics have alleged that the U.S. government’s enforcement of the FCPA is biased against foreign companies, and have sometimes gone so far as to accuse the U.S. of deliberately designing FCPA enforcement actions so as to secure economic advantages for U.S. companies at the expense of foreign rivals. A particularly sensationalistic version of the claim appeared in a book written by a French executive who was convicted and jailed on FCPA charges; that book became a best-seller in China, where the view that U.S. prosecutorial decisions are made to advance national economic interests is widespread. But the notion has been around for a while. (To give one personal example, last year I had a conversation with a journalist from a leading Brazilian news organization who asked for my views on the claim, which he’d apparently heard from several Brazilian sources, that the U.S. FCPA prosecution against Odebrecht was motivated by a desire to eliminate or cripple a company that competed with U.S. firms.) The U.S. government may have further contributed to this narrative in a 2018 press release on the Department of Justice’s “China Initiative”; that press release listed, as one component of the initiative, the “identif[ication of FCPA] cases involving Chinese companies that compete with American businesses.”

While it may be that the U.S. officials charged with enforcing the FCPA have their own biases and blind spots, the strong claim that the FCPA was some kind of a neo-mercantalist/neo-protectionist tool always struck me as far-fetched. (And this is true notwithstanding the FCPA passage in the China Initiative press release, which seemed more like something that got thrown in without much thought or vetting, rather than a substantive change in policy.) And it seems that the OECD Bribery Working Group’s review team came to the same conclusion. As the report states, “the lead examiners … have found no basis to consider that any FCPA decisions have been made for improper reasons.” Continue reading →

Guest Announcement: OECD Report and Webinar on Corporate Anticorruption Compliance

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France Chain, Senior Legal Analyst at the OECD’s Anti-Corruption Division, provides the following announcement regarding next week’s OECD webinar on “What really motivates anti-corruption compliance?”, an event which coincides with the launch of the new OECD Study on Corporate Anti-Corruption Compliance Drivers, Mechanisms and Ideas for Change.

Since the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention came into force in 1999, managing the risk of bribery has been identified as one of the most challenging areas of compliance for multinational businesses. Major foreign bribery scandals have resulted in record-breaking fines, which has seen the field of compliance grow exponentially over the past ten years. The OECD Foreign Bribery Report revealed that over 40% of foreign bribery cases involved management-level employees either paying or authorizing bribes, with CEOs involved in 12% of cases. At the same time, companies have shown that they can play a key role in detecting and responding to corruption. The OECD’s 2017 report on the Detection of Foreign Bribery showed that 23% of foreign bribery cases that resulted in definitive sanctions over the last 20 years were detected via self-reporting by companies.

However, implementing an effective compliance program is no easy task, and the COVID-19 pandemic has further heightened the challenges. With companies under great financial pressure to recover, anticorruption compliance departments and systems are being put to the test as never before.

To help shed light on some of these challenges and show us the way forward, a forthcoming OECD study on Corporate Anti-Corruption Compliance Drivers, Mechanisms and Ideas for Change explores what motivates companies to adopt anticorruption compliance measures, and looks at how companies (including small and medium-sized enterprises) could further be incentivized to do so. The study also underlines some of the main challenges faced by companies looking to implement anticorruption programs and proposes potential solutions, including ways for governments, international organizations, and civil society to better support companies in their anticorruption efforts.

The official launch of this study will take place on September 23 (one week from tomorrow), with a webinar panel discussion on What really motivates anti-corruption compliance?” to take place on September 23 from 15:00 to 16:30 Central European Time (9:00 am to 10:30 am U.S. East Coast time). You can register for the webinar here. The panel will bring together:

  • Axel Threlfall, Editor-at-large, Thomson Reuters (moderator)
  • Anna Hallberg, Minister of Foreign Trade and Nordic Affairs of Sweden (opening remarks)
  • Jeffrey Schlagenhauf, OECD Deputy Secretary-General (opening remarks)
  • France Chain, Senior Legal Analyst, OECD Anti-Corruption Division (presentation of key findings from the Study)
  • Alma Balcázar, Co-founder and Principal of GR Compliance SAS and Member of the International Council of Transparency International
  • Andrew Gentin, Assistant Chief, Fraud Section, Criminal Division, United States Department of Justice
  • Corinne Lagache, Chair, Business at OECDAnti-Corruption Committee, and Senior Vice President, Group Compliance Officer, Safran
  • Caroline Lindgren, Head of Legal and Local Compliance Officer of Sweco Sverige AB

Those attending the webinar will be able to submit questions through the chat during the live discussion on Zoom. The session will be recorded and subsequently posted on the OECD Anti-corruption and Integrity website.

The OECD Anti-Bribery Convention Should Ensure a Fair Distribution of Settlement Recoveries

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In December 2016, the United States, Brazil, and Switzerland announced that they had concluded plea agreements with the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht and its affiliate Braskem, in which the companies admitted their culpability in extensive bribery schemes involving upwards of US$800 million in bribes paid in a dozen countries—mainly though not exclusively in Latin America—and agreed to pay approximately US$3.5 billion in penalties to the US, Brazilian, and Swiss authorities. But with the exception of Brazil, none of the countries where the bribes were actually paid were entitled to receive any compensation under these plea agreements.

In fairness, the plea agreement with Odebrecht did require the company to cooperate with foreign law enforcement and regulatory agencies in any future investigation into related misconduct by Odebrecht or any of its current or former officers, directors, employers, or affiliates. The plea agreement further required Odebrecht to truthfully disclose all non-privileged factual information, and to make available its officers, employees, and affiliates, to foreign law enforcement authorities. Additionally, under the terms of the plea deal Odebrecht consented to US federal authorities sharing with foreign governments all documents and records that the company had provided to the US authorities in the course of the investigation into Odebrecht’s violation of US law. 

These well-intentioned provisions seem to have been included specifically to ensure that enforcement agencies of other countries could pursue their own actions against Odebrecht and its officers. But the plea agreements did not create a formal mechanism that enables foreign enforcement agencies to ask the DOJ, Swiss authorities, or Brazil to impose sanctions for breach of these conditions. If Odebrecht fails to fully cooperate with foreign enforcement agencies, that foreign government’s only recourse would be to try to convince (presumably through informal channels) the US, Brazilian, or Swiss authorities to sanction Odebrecht for breaching the plea agreement. But it’s unlikely that those governments will have much appetite for assessing these claims of non-cooperation. Furthermore, even if other countries do bring their own cases, the penalties imposed by the US, Switzerland, and Brazil were so high that Odebrecht simply doesn’t have the money to pay sufficient fines to other countries, at least in the short run.

The Odebrecht case may be unusual in its size, but it is not unique. It is therefore useful to reflect on whether the international community should adopt new mechanisms governing how the fines or reparations recovered in settlements of cross-border bribery cases are distributed, in order to ensure proportionality and fairness, particularly to victim nations. The most promising way forward would be to amend the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.The Convention already requires (in Article 4) that Convention parties shall consult with each other to determine which is the most appropriate jurisdiction for prosecution, and also requires (in Article 9) that Convention parties provide, to the fullest extent possible, “prompt and effective legal assistance” to any other Convention party concerning investigations and proceedings within the scope of the Convention. But the Convention does not explicitly address other forms of cooperation, such as ensuring fairness in the distribution of monetary recoveries. The Convention should be amended to include additional language that covers this topic, as follows: Continue reading →

The OECD Convention’s Article Prohibiting the Politicization of Foreign Bribery Enforcement Is in Desperate Need of Clarification

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Article 5 of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention provides that the policing of foreign bribery by Convention Parties shall not be influenced by (1) “considerations of national economic interest,” (2) “the potential effect upon relations with another State,” or (3) “the identity of the natural or legal persons involved.” Collectively, these mandates are known as the “Article 5 factors.” Article 5 is intended as a safeguard against the politicization or instrumentalization of foreign bribery laws. It is therefore vital to impartial foreign bribery enforcement, as well as to the integrity of foreign bribery enforcement generally.

The most well-known instance of an alleged Article 5 breach is the United Kingdom’s decision in 2006 to stop investigations into bribes paid by BAE Systems to public officials in Saudi Arabia. Then-Attorney General Peter Goldsmith argued that this decision was justified because the investigation could have damaged national security interests, as Saudi Arabia had threatened to end counterterrorism cooperation with the UK if the investigation continued. Goldsmith expressly denied that terminating the investigation for this reason constituted a breach of Article 5 because, as he put it, the decision to join the OECD Convention didn’t mean that the UK had “agreed to abandon any consideration of national security. [The Convention] certainly doesn’t say that and I don’t believe that’s what we could have intended or any other country could have intended.” The UK’s decision to suspend the BAE investigation, though challenged in court, was ultimately upheld.

More recently, the OECD has called attention to two other potential Article 5 breaches. First, an OECD news release stated that Turkey’s Article 5 compliance was in doubt due to inexplicably low level of foreign bribery enforcement, which the release suggested might be partly due to improper economic or political considerations. Second, another OECD news release raised concerns that Canada may have breached Article 5 by cancelling investigations into allegations that SNC Lavelin had bribed Libyan officials—a decision that observers believed was motivated by a desire to protect Canada’s national economic interests.

While it is encouraging to see the OECD adopt a more assertive approach to recognizing Article 5 breaches than it has in the past, these statements serve as stark reminders that there is not really an effective means for enforcing Article 5. And unfortunately, the uncertainty surrounding the meaning of Article 5 complicates the task of achieving Article 5 compliance. Continue reading →

Guest Post: New OECD Report Highlights the Importance of Non-Trial Resolutions in Foreign Bribery Cases

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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).

Where Is the Behavioral Insights Revolution in Anticorruption?

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Behavioral economics—the application of insights from behavioral psychology to economic analysis and regulatory policy-making—is all the rage. In addition to the contributions of this synthesis to academic economics, research in behavioral economics has suggested the possibility of innovative, simple, low-cost policy interventions that can shift behavior in dramatic and productive ways, without as much reliance on the heavy hand of regulators. These so-called “nudges” (named after Richard Thaler’s and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge) include, for example, things like automatic enrollment in retirement plans, which appears to increase the amount of people saving for their retirement more than tax incentives do. The possibility of using nudges or other approaches inspired by behavioral economics has captured the imagination of politicians, international organizations, and others, and there are now approximately 200 so-called “nudge units” in governments around the world looking for ways to employ behavioral insights to solve public policy problems

This enthusiasm has spread to the field of anticorruption. (See here, here, and on this blog here and here). But, while there have been a handful of anecdotal reports of successful nudge-like interventions in this area (e.g. here), there has not yet been much elaboration of what sorts of concrete anticorruption innovations follow from a behavioral perspective, nor of the evidence base supporting these sorts of interventions. Indeed, there seems to be surprisingly little data about successful applications of behavioral insights in the fields of integrity and anticorruption. That’s why I was so excited when last year the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) published Behavioural Insights for Public Integrity: Harnessing the Human Factor to Counter Corruption, a report that, according to the OECD, is the “first comprehensive review of different strands of behavioral sciences to identify practical lessons for integrity policies.”

Alas, rather than providing systematic evidence on how applying behavioral insights can make anticorruption efforts more effective and using that evidence to recommend new integrity tools, the OECD report largely rehashes the last couple of decades of behavioral economics more generally, and makes it seem—at least to me—that, at least so far, behavioral science does not really suggest anything revolutionary for integrity and anticorruption, and there is little or no data-backed guidance on how to apply nudging to solve problems of integrity. Continue reading →

Report on the OECD’s 6th Global Anti-Corruption and Integrity Forum

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For the sixth year running the Organization for Economic and Cooperation is hosting a two-day conference on ethics and corruption.  This year’s theme is how corruption has eroded trust in government and is helping advance what Secretary General Gurria termed in his opening remarks the three destructive “isms” haunting the world today: populism, nationalism, and protectionism.

The organization’s members are 35 of the world’ s richest nations (all save Russia and the PRC), and despite extraordinary levels of wealth by any historical measure, and recent upbeat economic news, citizens across the 35 have soured on their governments.  Trust in government across the 35 is at a record low while cynicism and distrust in elected leaders is at an all-time high, and though the Secretary General put much of the blame for the current funk on the 2008 economic crisis and the still uneven and unbalanced recovery, corruption, he stressed, has done its part.  Revelations of wrong-doing at the highest levels of government coupled with the petty corruption that frustrates the delivery of basic government services has only deepened citizens’ suspicions in their government.  If OECD member states are to win back citizens’ confidence, and avoid those destructive “isms,” they cannot, he argued, ignore the corruption question.

For those unable to fund a trip to Paris or with a sponsor or client willing to foot the bill, the conference home page with the agenda is here.  Four things I found useful on day one: Continue reading →

Improving Mutual Legal Assistance: Lessons from Asia

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Back in 2014, Rick called for further analysis of mutual legal assistance (MLA) processes and potential reforms that would promote responsiveness to MLA requests in anticorruption cases (and others). As a follow-up, I wanted to highlight the findings of a recent report from the Asian Development Bank (ADB)/Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia and the Pacific. The report, entitled “Mutual Legal Assistance in Asia and the Pacific: Experiences in 31 Jurisdictions,” provides examples of various obstacles to effective MLA, which I have sorted into two general categories: legal and practical. Continue reading →