Recently Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian Rabbitt delivered this virtual speech to a White Collar Crime workshop.
As excerpted below, Rabbitt touched upon a variety of white-collar crime topics including individual accountability, DOJ policy, and data analytics.
Regarding white-collar crime generally, Rabbitt stated:
In recent days, Pfizer has been in the news cycle for two materially different reasons.
Indeed, the juxtaposition is striking.
First, Pfizer (a company that resolved an approximate $60 million Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement action in 2012 concerning conduct in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Serbia) has been under renewed FCPA scrutiny since 2019 and recently disclosed as follows:
In the minds of some, companies that have resolved Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions are bad or unethical companies.
It is a tempting position to take. After all, the FCPA is about bribery and corruption.
However, it is a wrong position to take in many (but certainly not all) instances.
Fear based marketing, not a victim, dismissed, and for the reading stack.
It’s all here in the Friday roundup.
Fear Based Marketing
Another example of lawyers trying to market the COVID-19 situation by asserting that “the novel and exigent circumstances brought on by the pandemic significantly increase companies’ risk exposure under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and global anti-bribery laws.”
The piece even uses the personal protective equipment hypothetical that not even top DOJ officials seemed to be concerned about. (See here).
Earlier this week, Daniel Kahn (Sentior Deputy Chief, DOJ Criminal Division – Fraud Section) and Charles Cain (SEC FCPA Unit Chief) participated in this webinar.
During the webinar, Kahn and Cain addressed a variety questions related to their respective enforcement agencies relative to the COVID-19 crisis.
Set forth below are the issues addressed and their responses.
