In March 2026, the DOJ criminally charged David Ferrera and Marc Tilman with FCPA and related offenses in connection with an alleged bribery scheme involving an employee of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Reims (CHU Reims) in France. (See here for the prior post).
According to the DOJ: “CHU Reims was wholly owned and controlled by the government of France and performed a function that France treated as its own. CHU Reims was an “instrumentality” of a foreign government, and CHU Reims’s officers and employees were “foreign officials,” as those terms are used in the FCPA …”.
The prior post noted that the DOJ enforcement theory that employees (such as physicians, nurses, mid-wives, lab personnel, etc.) of certain foreign health care systems can “foreign officials” under the FCPA – and thus occupy a status akin to a President or Prime Minister – was dubious.
Even though the DOJ has used this enforcement theory approximately 35 times in corporate enforcement actions, those enforcement actions were never subjected to any meaningful judicial scrutiny.
The Ferrera matter is the first time the DOJ has ever used this dubious enforcement theory to criminally charge an individual with FCPA offenses.
Earlier this week, Ferrera filed a motion for a bill of particulars stating:
“In the nearly 50-year history of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the criminal prosecutions litigated under it, the government has yet to attempt the uniquely broad interpretation it pursues in this case, by which all employees of a foreign public health system would qualify as “foreign officials” within the meaning of the statute.
Specifically, the government relies on the novel theory that payments to a French physician [] were bribes to a “foreign official” under the FCPA because [] was employed by a French state-owned and state-controlled public university hospital (CHU Reims). Neither the FCPA’s test nor any controlling case law supports such a broad interpretation, and the defense will challenge that legal premise in a subsequent motion to dismiss pursuant to Rule 12.”
Ferrera is represented by Bienert Katzman Littrell Williams LLP attorneys John Littrell, Ryan Fraser, Alexandra Yates and Bo Griffith.
