A “foreign official.”
Without one, there can be no FCPA anti-bribery violation (civil or criminal). Who were the alleged “foreign officials” of 2019?
This post highlights the alleged “foreign officials” from 2019 corporate DOJ and SEC FCPA enforcement actions.
There were 14 core FCPA enforcement actions in 2019. Of the 14 actions, 8 (57%) involved, in whole or in part, employees of alleged state-owned or state-controlled entities (“SOEs).
Convicted, sentenced, to FCPA Inc. and for the reading stack. It’s all here in the Friday Roundup.
Convicted
As noted in this DOJ release: “[Donville Inniss] a former member of the Barbados Parliament, who also served as the Minister of Industry of Barbados, was found guilty [of two counts of money laundering and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering] by a federal jury for his role in a scheme to launder bribes paid to him by executives of the Insurance Corporation of Barbados Limited (ICBL).”
As highlighted in this post, like prior years (see here, here and here) much of the largeness of 2019 FCPA enforcement resulted from corporate enforcement actions against foreign companies.
Specifically, of the 14 corporate Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions in 2019, 8 (57%) were against foreign companies (based in many instances on mere listing of securities on U.S. markets or 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 $2.65 billion in FCPA settlement amounts from 2019 corporate enforcement actions, approximately $2.2 billion (83%) was from enforcement actions against foreign companies.
This recent post highlighted SEC Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement against issuers in 2019.
Today’s post focuses on the other FCPA enforcement agency – the Department of Justice – and highlights various facts and figures relevant to DOJ FCPA enforcement in 2019 against business organizations. (See here for a similar post from 2018; here from 2017, here from 2016, here from 2015, here from 2014, here from 2013, here from 2012, here from 2011, and here from 2010).
Settlement Amounts and Specifics
In 2019, the DOJ brought 8 corporate FCPA enforcement actions.
The FCPA Flash podcast provides in an audio format the same fresh, candid, and informed commentary about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and related topics as readers have come to expect from written posts on FCPA Professor.
This FCPA Flash podcast episode is a conversation with Gibson Dunn attorneys John Chesley and Chris Sullivan. During the podcast, the guests talk about: various 2019 FCPA enforcement statistics; the emergence of “FCPA clusters”; why FCPA related enforcement actions are important to FCPA practitioners; and whether the number of FCPA trials in 2019 was an aberration or a trend.
