DOJ Announces 2020 Criminal Charges Against Individuals In Connection With Alleged Marshall Islands Bribery Scheme
Last Friday, the DOJ announced that two Marshall Island nationals (Cary Yan and Gina Zhou – pictured) arrived in the U.S. after being extradited from Thailand based on 2020 criminal charges that the individuals violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (and other laws) in connection with an alleged scheme to bribe elected officials in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) in exchange for passing certain legislation.
According to the indictment, Yan and Zhou acted as officers, directors, employees, and agents of a New York City based non-governmental organization (NGO) and, while in New York City and other locations in U.S. territory, to offer and pay bribes to government officials in the RMI to pass certain legislation that would benefit the business interests of Yan, Zhou and their associates.
Yet Another Individual Enforcement Action Involving Venezuela
As highlighted in this recent post, approximately 55% of individual enforcement actions on the DOJ’s FCPA website since 2018 concern non-FCPA offenses in connection with alleged foreign bribery schemes – most often money laundering offenses – and an astounding 37% or so of individual enforcement actions involve just one country: Venezuela.
Continuing this theme, the DOJ announced yesterday that a federal grand jury in Miami returned an indictment charging Rafael Rixon Rafael Moreno Oropeza (a Venezuelan national) for laundering the proceeds of substantially inflated procurement contracts obtained by making bribe payments to senior officials at Petropiar, a joint venture between Venezuela’s state-owned and state-controlled energy company and an American oil company.
Time Spent On The DOJ’s FCPA Website
I recently spent some time on the DOJ’s FCPA Website and looked at all “Enforcement Actions” involving individuals from 2018 to the present.
Many of the separately listed “Enforcement Actions” involve multiple individual defendants and some individual enforcement actions are listed in more than one year.
By my estimation though, the DOJ’s FCPA website – from 2018 to the present – contains information about 175 individuals and set forth below are some interesting statistics.
Slumbering Individual FCPA Enforcement Actions
Most in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act space learn when the DOJ announces criminal FCPA charges against individuals. Thereafter, the tendency (including by myself) is to sort of forget about many of the individual cases.
However, recently I examined the dockets for all individuals criminally charged with FCPA offenses since January 1, 2017 and was surprised to learn that a meaningful percentage of these cases are slumbering with no substantive activity recorded in quite some time.
Thus, when viewing DOJ FCPA individual enforcement action statistics it is important to keep in mind that many of these cases are slumbering and are not being actively prosecuted.
The Gap In SEC Individual FCPA Enforcement Actions Is Approaching Two Years
One reason to take FCPA enforcement agency rhetoric with a grain of salt is because it is warranted.
For instance, the FCPA enforcement agencies often talk about the importance of x and how they are committed to x, but in reality rarely do x.
Case in point is SEC individual FCPA enforcement actions.
For many years, SEC enforcement officials have talked about the importance of individual FCPA enforcement actions and set forth below are representative quotes from over the years.