A reading stack edition of the Friday roundup.
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Miller & Chevalier’s FCPA Summer Review 2015 is here.
Regarding the DOJ’s latest FCPA trial court debacle in the Sigelman case (see here, here, here and here for prior posts), the review states:
“The DOJ’s prosecution and trial of Joseph Sigelman deserves special notice, as it was the DOJ’s first trial of an individual on FCPA charges since the acquittal in January 2012 of John Joseph O’Shea. Sigelman’s trial … lasted nine days and ended with prosecutors entering into a negotiated guilty plea with Sigelman on only one of the six counts with which he was charged after a key government witness admitted to lying on the stand. Sigelman’s sentence of probation with no imprisonment was essentially a victory for Sigelman, and the judge was particularly critical of the government’s key witness as well as its sentencing recommendation. The trial adds to a string of recent FCPA prosecutions involving individuals in which the government has failed to secure a conviction or its recommended sentence, highlighting the difficulties the DOJ has sometimes encountered when forced to bear its burden of proof in court.”
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Relevant to the double standard issues frequently highlighted on these pages, one interesting side note to come out of the Sigelman trial was testimony about the alleged “commonplace” practice among certain law firms of providing expensive tickets to high-profile sporting events to corporate clients. (See here from Bloomberg).
Do that with certain other clients or potential clients and the DOJ/SEC would be apt to call that bribery.
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My Southern Illinois University School of Law colleague Lucian Dervan co-authored an article with Ellen Podgor (White Collar Crime Prof Blog) titled “White Collar Crime: Still Hazy After All These Years.” The abstract states:
“With a seventy-five year history of sociological and later legal roots, the term “white collar crime” remains an ambiguous concept that academics, policy makers, law enforcement personnel and defense counsel are unable to adequately define. Yet the use of the term “white collar crime” skews statistical reporting and sentencing for this conduct. This Article provides a historical overview of its linear progression and then a methodology for a new architecture in examining this conduct. It separates statutes into clear-cut white collar offenses and hybrid statutory offenses, and then applies this approach with an empirical study that dissects cases prosecuted under hybrid white collar statutes of perjury, false statements, obstruction of justice, and RICO. The empirical analysis suggests the need for an individualized multivariate approach to categorizing white collar crime to guard against broad federal statutes providing either under-inclusive or over-inclusive examination of this form of criminality.”
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Bruce Carton (Securities Docket) recently hosted this webinar titled “The U.K. Bribery Act After Five Years – Where Are We Now?” Panelists were Barry Vitou (author of thebriberyact.com) and Anne-Marie Ottaway of the law firm Pinsent Masons; Vivian Robinson QC, former general counsel to the UK’s Serious Fraud Office and now a partner at McGuireWoods; and Julian Glass of FTI Consulting.
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A good weekend to all.