Friday Roundup
Scrutiny updates, more press, and for the reading stack. It’s all here in the Friday roundup.
Scrutiny Updates
Glencore
As highlighted in this prior post, in March the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued an enforcement advisory concerning companies and individuals “that timely and voluntarily disclose to the Division violations of the Commodity Exchange Act involving foreign corrupt practices, where the voluntary disclosure is followed by full cooperation and appropriate remediation.”
Conventional wisdom was that this advisory just did not fall out of the sky, but was a reaction to something. In my own mind, that something was Glencore’s FCPA scrutiny which the company disclosed in July 2018 (see here).
FCPA Flash Podcast – A Conversation With Laura Brookover Regarding The CFTC’s Recent Enforcement Advisory
The FCPA Flash podcast provides in an audio format the same fresh, candid, and informed commentary about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and related topics as readers have come to expect from written posts on FCPA Professor.
This FCPA Flash episode is a conversation with Laura Brookover (Covington & Burling and former lawyer in the Enforcement Division of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission – CFTC). The podcast concerns the CFTC’s recent enforcement advisory concerning “violations of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) involving foreign corrupt practices” (see here for the prior post) and during the podcast Brookover discusses: the background of the CFTC and the CEA; why the CFTC may have issued the advisory; what type of conduct involving foreign corrupt practices could fall under the CEA; and various issues associated with CFTC enforcement actions.
Enforcement Developments
Recently, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued this enforcement advisory concerning companies and individuals “that timely and voluntarily disclose to the Division violations of the Commodity Exchange Act involving foreign corrupt practices, where the voluntary disclosure is followed by full cooperation and appropriate remediation.” (See here for the press release and here for remarks by a CFTC official).
This headline on the FCPA Blog states “CFTC Will Investigate and Prosecute FCPA Violations.” However, this is a false statement as the CFTC advisory clearly concerns violations of the Commodity Exchange Act.