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Dear FCPA Blog: Please Stop Spreading FCPA Misinformation

By on October 20, 2022 in Facilitating Payments, Uncategorized
Dear

Call me old-fashioned, but when you voluntarily run a website devoted to a specific law (and have numerous paid advertisers with blinking and flashing ads placed on your website) you ought to have a basic obligation to get things right about that specific law. This includes being knowledgeable about the rather limited case law that exists regarding specific topics relevant to the specific law that is the focus of your website.

Nevertheless, the FCPA Blog is at it again with its FCPA misinformation.

This post, about the FCPA’s facilitation payment exception, states: “The burden of proof is always on the one asserting the exception as a defense.”

This is false.

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Checking In On The Wakil Enforcement Action

By on August 24, 2022 in Corrupt Intent, Facilitating Payments, Naman Wakil, Obtain or Retain Business, Statute of Limitations
Checkin

As highlighted in this prior post, in August 2021 the DOJ announced that Naman Wakil, a Syrian national and U.S. lawful permanent resident, was “arrested in Miami on charges related to his alleged role in a scheme to bribe Venezuelan officials and launder funds to obtain contracts from Venezuela’s state-owned and state-controlled energy company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), and Venezuela’s state-owned and state-controlled food company that purchased food for Venezuela, Corporación de Abastecimiento y Servicios Agrícola (CASA).”

Recently, Wakil (through his attorneys Stephen Binhak and Black Srebnick attorneys Howard Srebnick and Jackie Perczek) filed three motions.

The first motion is a motion to dismiss the indictment for failure to state an offense and states in summary:

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A Reminder Why Congress Chose To Exempt Facilitating Payments From The Reach Of The FCPA’s Anti-Bribery Provisions

By on August 4, 2022 in Facilitating Payments
reminder

The State Department recently released this Investment Climate Statement for Côte d’Ivoire. It caught my eye not because Côte d’Ivoire is a prominent market for U.S. business, but rather because information in the statement provides a nice reminder why Congress chose to exempt facilitation payments from the reach of the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions and how the same conditions motivating Congress to exempt facilitation payments are still present today.

In pertinent part, the statement reads:

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Issues To Consider From The Stericycle Enforcement Action

By on April 27, 2022 in Corrupt Intent, Country Exits, Facilitating Payments, Gray Cloud, Healthcare Providers As Foreign Officials, Internal Controls, Monitor, Obtain or Retain Business, Stericycle, When the Government Doesn’t Pay
Issues

This previous post highlighted the recent net $59 million Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement action against Stericycle (an Illinois based medical waste disposal company) for conduct in Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina.

Portions of the alleged conduct were egregious in that an executive of the company’s Latin America division orchestrated the bribery schemes and others associated with the company used “spreadsheets to track the bribe payments.”

Nevertheless, there are several legal and policy issues to consider from the enforcement action.

Timeline

As highlighted in this post, Stericycle disclosed its FCPA scrutiny in mid-2017.

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