Each January, this website publishes numerous year in review posts (see here).
In addition, for the 10th year in a row I authored a more comprehensive Foreign Corrupt Practices Act year in review / recent developments article that is published by a law review or journal.
The 2018 version (forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Journal) can be downloaded here.
Below is the abstract.
If the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is an area of your practice or interest, this post may make you feel like a kid in a candy store.
With much rhetoric floating around regarding the FCPA and with many creative and haphazard counting methods employed by certain FCPA Inc. participants, it is instructive to take a look at actual statistics using accurate and consistently applied math.
FCPA Professor has been the place to visit this month for in-depth 2018 FCPA enforcement statistics as well as comparisons to historical statistics. If you missed the daily posts, no worries. This post consolidates in one place the statistics recently published on FCPA Professor.
For years, these pages have highlighted the need for a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act common language as to the basic question of “what is an FCPA enforcement action?” (See here, here, here, here. See here for the article “A Common Language to Remedy Distorted FCPA Enforcement Statistics” which exposes in detailed fashion distorted FCPA enforcement statistics).
As highlighted in the article, the absence of an FCPA common language has numerous negative effects including infecting nearly all FCPA enforcement statistics.
As highlighted in this post, like prior years (see here and here) much of the largeness of 2018 FCPA enforcement resulted from corporate enforcement actions against foreign companies.
Specifically, of the 17 corporate enforcement actions in 2018, 9 (53%) were against foreign companies (based in many instances on mere listing of securities on U.S. markets and in a few instances on sparse allegations of a U.S. nexus in furtherance of a bribery scheme). Even more dramatic, of the net approximate $1 billion in FCPA settlement amounts from 2018 corporate enforcement actions, approximately 72% of this number was from enforcement actions against foreign companies.
A “foreign official.”
Without one, there can be no FCPA anti-bribery violation (civil or criminal). Who were the alleged “foreign officials” of 2018?
This post highlights the alleged “foreign officials” from 2018 corporate DOJ and SEC FCPA enforcement actions.
There were 17 FCPA core corporate enforcement actions in 2018. Of the 17 enforcement actions 9 (53%) involved, in whole or in part, employees of alleged state-owned or state-controlled entities (“SOEs) with an additional 2 actions (12%) involving, in whole or in part, individuals associated with foreign health care systems.
