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

The ineffectiveness of French efforts to combat overseas bribery is well-known if not entirely understood. Put most simply, in the 17 years since France adopted comprehensive anti-bribery legislation, essentially similar to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), France has not convicted a single corporation of classic overseas bribery under that legislation. This shortfall has been regularly documented in periodic reports by the OECD, and by NGOs such as Transparency International and others. Its causes are complex. They may include a simple deficit in willpower, but as others as well as I have pointed out, French criminal procedures, and in particular the difficulty of demonstrating corporate responsibility under French criminal law, impede effective prosecution.

Stung by the fact that four very large French companies entered into a variety of guilty pleas or deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) with US authorities, pursuant to which these companies paid well over $2 billion in fines and other payments to the US treasury, in December 2016 the French legislature finally adopted a long-pending law, known as the Loi Sapin II, which progressively goes into effect during 2017. The law is unmistakably a reaction to US success in prosecuting French companies under the FCPA: it only applies to corporations, and only to allegations of overseas corruption or other crimes very similar to those prosecutable under the FCPA.

Several of new law’s provisions are unexceptional: it creates a new Anticorruption Agency, called the AFA, to replace an existing agency, known as the SCPC, which was widely viewed as ineffective; the law requires medium- and large-sized companies to adopt compliance programs pursuant to criteria to be developed by the AFA. (While the AFA can impose administrative sanctions for absent or deficient compliance programs, it will have no criminal investigative authority). The new law also slightly extends the territorial reach of French anti-bribery laws to make them applicable to companies that “carry out all or part of their economic activity on French territory,” and enhances whistleblower protection available under existing laws. But the Loi Sapin II’s most ambitious innovation by far is a series of amendments to the French Code of Criminal Procedure to permit negotiated outcomes generally similar to DPAs as practiced for many years in the United States, and since 2014 in the United Kingdom, that result in the payment of fines and other penalties but not in a criminal judgment. Under the new provisions, a French corporation may enter into an agreement, known as a “Judicial Convention in the Public Interest” (JCPI), under which the firm admits facts sufficient to show the commission of a relevant crime, and agrees to a fine that may be as high as 30% of the company’s annual turnover for the prior three years. The company may also agree to the imposition of a corporate monitor, to be supervised by the AFA. Continue reading →