A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to be able to attend an event at the University of Buenos Aires (co-sponsored by the New York University Law School), that focused, among other things, on a new draft bill, currently under consideration in the Argentinian legislature, that would impose criminal liability on corporations and other legal persons for corruption-related offenses. I’m largely unfamiliar with Argentina’s legal system, so I was very much an outside observer for this discussion, but there were a couple of things about the draft bill that struck me as interesting and worthy of attention from the wider anticorruption community. (Apologies for not providing a link: I’m working off a hardcopy of an unofficial English translation of the draft bill, which I can’t find on the web.)

A lot of the provisions in the bill are fairly standard, though in many respects the bill is quite aggressive. For example, Article 3 makes parent companies jointly and severally liable for sanctions imposed on their subsidiaries (without any requirement to show that the subsidiary was an agent of the parent), while Article 4 imposes successor (criminal) liability in all cases of merger, acquisition, or other corporate transformation. In both these respects, the draft Argentinian bill imposes more sweeping corporate criminal liability than does U.S. law. Also, like U.S. law, the Argentinian bill (in Article 2) would make corporations criminally liable for the actions of its officers, employees, and agents.

But what most caught my attention were the draft bill’s provisions on sanctions: Continue reading →