Overheard, interesting and for the reading stack.
It’s all here in the Friday roundup.
Overheard
In connection with the ongoing saga of Ericsson (see here for a recent post) during a recent investor conference call, E. Borje Ekholm (President, CEO and Director) stated:
Guilty plea, off-target, fear-based marketing, and for the reading stack. It’s all here in the Friday Roundup.
Guilty Plea
This recent post highlighted the DOJ’s money laundering case against Luis Enrique Martinelli Linares (a citizen of Panama and Italy) and his brother Ricardo Alberto Martinelli Linares (also a citizen of Panama and Italy), for “participat[ing] in the Odebrecht bribery scheme by, among other things, serving as intermediaries for bribe payments and the provision of other things of value that Odebrecht offered and provided to the Panama Government Official.
Yesterday, the DOJ announced that Luis Martinelli Linares pleaded guilty.
Yesterday, SEC Chair Gary Gensler delivered this speech.
I literally laughed out loud as to certain portions of Gensler’s speech.
I didn’t laugh because what Gensler said was unreasonable. To the contrary, much of what he said represents sound policy. Rather, I laughed because I have closely followed SEC enforcement practices (and speeches from enforcement agency officials) for over a decade.
Gensler began his speech as follows:
This prior post highlighted Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco’s recent speech in which she made various policy pronouncements on behalf of the DOJ relevant to corporate crime investigations and prosecutions.
Sandra Moser (currently a lawyer in private practice at Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP) knows a thing or two about DOJ policy relevant to those topics as she previously served as Chief of the DOJ’s Fraud Section.
In this recent Law360 column Moser (and her co-authors) write:
Including the first time I proposed this concept in 2010, this is the 11th time I have written this general post (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for the previous versions). Until things change I will keep writing it which means I will probably keep writing this same general post long into the future.
The proposal is this: when a company voluntarily discloses an FCPA internal investigation to the DOJ and/or SEC and when one or both of the enforcement agencies do not bring an enforcement action, have the enforcement agency publicly state, in a thorough and transparent manner, the facts the company disclosed and why the enforcement agency did not bring an enforcement action based on those facts.
