Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell on the DOJ’s FCPA Pilot Program, scrutiny alerts and updates, quotable and for the reading stack. It’s all here in the Friday roundup.
Caldwell on the FCPA Pilot Program
This article contains a recent Q&A with Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell about the DOJ’s FCPA Pilot Program.
After reading the below excerpts, you might also want to read the article “Grading the DOJ’s FCPA Pilot Program.”
A plethora of scrutiny alerts and updates and for the reading stack. It’s all here in the Friday Roundup.
Scrutiny Alerts and Updates
Unaoil Related
The disclosures keep coming from companies mentioned in the recent Unaoil media reports (see here for the prior post).
FMC Technologies, an oil and gas services company, recently disclosed:
“On March 28, 2016 we received an inquiry from the United States Department of Justice (“DOJ”) related to the DOJ’s investigation of whether certain services Unaoil S.A.M. provided to its clients, including FMC Technologies, violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. We are cooperating with the DOJ’s inquiry and are conducting our own internal investigation.”
KBR, a company which resolved an FCPA enforcement action in 2009 concerning conduct in Nigeria , recently disclosed:
In passing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Congress anticipated that the “criminalization of foreign corporate bribery will to a significant extent act as a self-enforcing preventative mechanism.” Likewise since the FCPA’s earliest days, the DOJ has recognized that the “most efficient means of implementing the FCPA is voluntary compliance by the American business community.”
In short, the FCPA was never intended to be just a mechanism to achieve “hard enforcement” (actual enforcement actions), but more a mechanism to achieve “soft enforcement” (compliance) in furtherance of the statutory objective of reducing bribery and corruption. Indeed, as stated by the Sixth Circuit in Lamb v. Phillip Morris Inc., 915 F.2d 1024 (1990) and repeated by several other courts, the FCPA’s statutory scheme “clearly evinces a preference for compliance in lieu of prosecution.”
Yet, as the FCPA nears its 40th anniversary those in this space need to start asking the question of whether the FCPA – as currently written and currently enforced – has been effective?
