This site has long followed the criminal prosecution of four former Commonwealth Edison (“ComEd”) executives and associates based on allegations of attempting to influence and rewarding the former Speaker of the Illinois House of Representatives in order to assist with the passage of legislation favorable to the electric utility company.
Bribery of a state politician is not ordinarily the type of conduct that results in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act issues.
However, ComEd (a majority-owned indirect subsidiary of Exelon Corp) was an issuer (as was Exelon) and the FCPA has always been a law much broader than its name suggests because of the FCPA’s books and records and internal controls provisions.
Indeed, the most serious (from a sentencing and fine perspective) criminal charges the four individuals were found guilty of were record falsification in violation of the FCPA.
Earlier this week, Anne Pramaggiore (who served as CEO of ComEd and later as a senior executive at an affiliate of Exelon Corp) was sentenced to two years in federal prison.
The following statement was issued by her team.
“Former Commonwealth Edison CEO Anne Pramaggiore, the only female CEO in the company’s history, who turned around a failing electric utility and turned it into one of the country’s best while cutting rates four times and reducing outages to historic lows, released the following statement today through a spokesman, Mark Herr Communications:
Statement
We are disappointed by the sentence imposed today. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the sentence– two years in prison – with the federal Probation Department’s recommendation of no jail time and probation.
The sentence is even harder to fathom when the bribery charges were vacated by the Court after the Supreme Court ruled in Snyder and the Government did not seek to retry those counts.
With no bribery conviction, the sentence rests solely on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act allegations. There is nothing foreign or corrupt about the facts here.
In February when President Trump paused FCPA enforcement, he said the law “has been systematically, and to a steadily increasing degree, stretched beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interests of the United States.”
That has happened here. Ms. Pramaggiore faces jail despite the documents at issue being true. Chicago is not a foreign jurisdiction.
Ms. Pramaggiore, a civic leader, trailblazing electric utilities executive, the only female CEO in Commonwealth Edison’s history — and an innocent woman — will appeal the verdict and sentence to the Seventh Circuit and, if necessary, to the Supreme Court.”
The statement is interesting on several fronts.
First, the FCPA has always been a law much broader than its name suggests and there is nothing in the FCPA’s accounting provisions which require that conduct be foreign in nature. In fact, the FCPA’s accounting provisions are frequently charged in enforcement actions that have nothing to do with foreign conduct – something this site has long termed non-FCPA, FCPA enforcement actions.
This dynamic makes the statement “Chicago is not a foreign jurisdiction” off-target.
Second, while there is nothing in President Trump’s February Executive Order “Pausing” FCPA enforcement which explicitly states so, it is assumed that the following cite to the order “[the FCPA] has been systematically, and to a steadily increasing degree, stretched beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interests of the United States” is in reference to the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions – provisions not implicated in the ComEd matter.
