Ten years ago this week, the 11th Circuit released its decision in U.S. v. Esquenazi.
The case was, and remains, the only appellate court decision in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act history to substantively address the FCPA’s “foreign official” element.
As discussed below, the Esquenazi decision was, and remains, a flawed decision.
In pertinent part the court stated:
An “instrumentality” under … the FCPA is an entity controlled by the government of a foreign country that performs a function the controlling government treats as its own. Certainly, what constitutes control and what constitutes a function the government treats as its own are fact-bound questions. It would be unwise and likely impossible to exhaustively answer them in the abstract. Because we only have this case before us, we do not purport to list all of the factors that might prove relevant to deciding whether an entity is an instrumentality of a foreign government. For today, we provide a list of some factors that may be relevant to deciding the issue.
To decide if the government “controls” an entity, courts and juries should look to the foreign government’s formal designation of that entity; whether the government has a majority interest in the entity; the government’s ability to hire and fire the entity’s principals; the extent to which the entity’s profits, if any, go directly into the governmental fisc, and, by the same token, the extent to which the government funds the entity if it fails to break even; and the length of time these indicia have existed.
[…]
We then turn to the second element relevant to deciding if an entity is an instrumentality of a foreign government under the FCPA — deciding if the entity performs a function the government treats as its own. Courts and juries should examine whether the entity has a monopoly over the function it exists to carry out; whether the government subsidizes the costs associated with the entity providing services; whether the entity provides services to the public at large in the foreign country; and whether the public and the government of that foreign country generally perceive the entity to be performing a governmental function.”
The Esquenazi decision was, and remains, a flawed decision.
As I explained in my amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to consider the case:
“The FCPA’s legislative history indicates that Congress did not intend that statutory term to include employees of SOEs. In the legislative process that ultimately produced the FCPA, Congress specifically considered competing bills that would have included employees of SOEs as “foreign officials” yet rejected those definitions in the version of the FCPA it enacted.
[…]
The Eleventh Circuit’s interpretation of the statute was erroneous. The decision below failed to consider the enacting legislative history of the provisions it construed. It instead mistakenly relied on amendments enacted more than twenty years later and mistakenly concluded that those amendments were intended to bring the FCPA into strict conformity with the OECD.
The Eleventh Circuit’s express reliance on amendments to the FCPA in 1998 is flawed in at least two respects. First, the 1998 amendments to the FCPA are, on their face, irrelevant to the statutory-interpretation question at issue in this case because those amendments did not modify the portion of the “foreign official” definition in question here. Second, contrary to the Eleventh Circuit’s conclusion, the 1998 amendments did not fully conform the FCPA to the OECD Convention. Because they did not conform the FCPA to the OECD Convention, the amendments the Eleventh Circuit relied upon do not support the conclusion that the FCPA’s “foreign official” element includes employees of SOEs.
Amending a key element of a top-priority federal criminal statute of such significance to international commerce is not properly accomplished through a process of judicial inferences about the supposed purpose of subsequent, unrelated statutory amendments. Rather, actual legislative action is required to amend the FCPA. If Congress wished to include employees of SOEs in the statutory definition of “foreign official,” it easily could have done so — when enacting the FCPA in 1977, when amending the FCPA in 1998, or on any other occasion. Congress has expressly included employees of SOEs in similar statutory definitions contained in other legislation passed both before and after the enactment of the FCPA. Similarly, the legislative bodies of several signatory countries to the OECD Convention have taken specific legislative action to include SOEs and related concepts in their comparable anti-corruption legislation.”
As highlighted on these pages several times, over the past approximate decade, the Supreme Court has numerous times rejected expansive statutory interpretations by the DOJ.
If the Supreme Court would have accepted the Esquenazi case, it is likely that the court would have rejected the DOJ’s “foreign official” interpretation.
The reason the Supreme Court declined to hear case is likely due to the absence of a circuit split on the “foreign official” issue.
In the decade since the Esquenazi decision, there has not been any meaningful “foreign officials” challenges – let alone additional appellate court decisions. This is largely the result of the alternative vehicles used by the DOJ to resolve corporate enforcement action, the general absence of individual charges in connection with most corporate enforcement actions, and other discretionary decisions by the enforcement agencies.
So long as these dynamics continue, Supreme Court review of the key elements of a top-priority federal criminal statute of significant importance to all businesses and individuals engaged in international commerce is unlikely.
