International Law

Bourke Prepares His Defense

Posted on April 12, 2009
Frederic Bourke is taking video testimony from a critically ill friend that may help prove Bourke was an innocent victim of a massive investment fraud perpetrated by Viktor Kozeny. Bourke, 62, goes on trial June 1 for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act...

Rocket Scientist Sentenced To Prison

Posted on April 08, 2009
The Virginia-based physicist who sold controlled space-launch technology to China by bribing government officials there has been sentenced to 51 months in prison. Shu Quan-Sheng (left), 68, a native of China, naturalized U.S. citizen and PhD physicist, pleaded guilty in November 2008 to one count of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and two counts of violating the Arms Export Control Act...

Six More Indicted In Valve-Maker Case

Posted on April 08, 2009
In the biggest multiple-party indictment yet under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, six more former executives of Control Components Inc., an Orange County, Calif.-based valve company, were charged yesterday with a decade-long conspiracy to win contracts by bribing officials at foreign state-owned companies...

Dear BAE And Prince Bandar: You're Boring

Posted on April 07, 2009
That, at least, is the verdict from Tony Perry of the LA Times in his review of "Frontline: Black Money." The PBS documentary by Lowell Bergman and Oriana Zill de Granados features the story of BAE and the Saudi Prince. Perry says the show "is first-class journalism: high-minded, fact-filled and balanced, with some eye-catching visuals...

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Latin Node Inc. Pleads Guilty

Posted on April 07, 2009
Latin Node Inc. (Latinode), formerly a privately held Florida corporation, pleaded guilty on April 7, 2009 to violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with improper payments in Honduras and Yemen, the Justice Department has announced...

What's Being Lost?

Posted on April 06, 2009
No one blames the The New York Times Company. If the only way it can save the New York Times itself is by shutting down the Boston Globe, then the owner's choice is easy. And no one blames the management at the Globe either. The paper hasn't been badly run; it's just become very unprofitable over the past decade -- like most other big-city newspapers in the United States...

GE Resolves FCPA-Related Private Claims

Posted on April 05, 2009
General Electric and its former in-house counsel, Adriana Koeck, who claimed she was fired for telling her superiors about the company's possible Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations in Brazil, have settled their litigation. GE had sued her for wrongfully disclosing its confidential information, while she claimed she was fired in retaliation for whistleblower activity protected by Section 806 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (18 U...

On The Side Of Justice . . .

Posted on April 02, 2009
Great words from Ellen Podgor at the White Collar Crime Prof Blog (here) about Attorney General Eric Holder's decision this week to drop the prosecution of former Senator Ted Stevens: This dismissal is monumental in terms of sending a message that this justice department will be very different...

Gerald Green Faces New Charge

Posted on April 01, 2009
Prosecutors once again expanded the indictment against the Hollywood couple accused of bribing a Thai official in exchange for contracts to stage the Bangkok Film Festival. The second superseding indictment filed on March 11 added a charge of obstruction of justice against Gerald Green...

Enforcement Report For Q1 '09

Posted on March 31, 2009
We count seven Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions since the start of the year, including indictments, pleas and settlements, along with one newly disclosed investigation. Four of the enforcement actions involve individuals, and four relate to KBR...

Kleptocrats In Court

Posted on March 30, 2009
The United States fights foreign kleptocrats through Proclamation 7750, by denying them and their families U.S. visas. And through Section 314(a) of the Patriot Act, which it can use to reach out to more than 25,000 financial institutions to find accounts and transactions of anyone who may be involved in laundering kleptocratic assets...

KBR: Nigerians Tell Their Own Story

Posted on March 29, 2009
A new Nigeria-based publication called Next has just posted an article (here) naming some of the officials who took bribes from KBR and its TSKJ joint venture for the $6 billion Bonny Island LNG development project. The story by Dapo Olorunyomi and Mojeed Musiliku names three former presidents among the bribe takers, including Sani Abacha, Abdusalami Abubakar, and Olusegun Obasanjo...

Proclamation 7750 Unwrapped

Posted on March 26, 2009
Last week, while we were looking into ways the U.S. fights foreign kleptocrats, we heard about Presidential Proclamation 7750. It was issued in 2004 and, by 2006, a high State Department official was calling it a "key tool" in America's anti-corruption arsenal...

First Look: The U.K.'s Draft Antibribery Law

Posted on March 25, 2009
Britain's Justice Secretary, Jack Straw, unveiled a draft bill on March 25 that will completely overhaul the country's antibribery laws. He called the old laws anachronistic, inconsistent, unclear, and difficult for the public to understand and for prosecutors and the courts to apply...

Voices From Africa

Posted on March 24, 2009
Marc Ona Essangui is from Gabon -- a west African country with lots of oil, about a million and a half people, and just two presidents since independence from France in 1960. He's the local head of the Publish What You Pay coalition, an NGO operating in 70 countries "that helps citizens of resource-rich developing countries hold their governments accountable for the management of revenues from the oil, gas and mining industries...

Unfinished Business

Posted on March 23, 2009
We don't know how many of the 50 or so disclosed and pending Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations will be resolved this year. But here are some we're watching:Alcoa. In February 2008, government-owned Aluminum Bahrain BSC (Alba) accused its long-time U...

Bourke's Defense Is Revealed, Then Sealed

Posted on March 22, 2009
Bloomberg's David Glovin filed a story Friday (here) reporting that Frederic Bourke will argue that he didn't violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because there were no corrupt payments to foreign officials. Bourke, 62, was indicted in 2005 with Czech-born fugitive Viktor Kozeny, 45, for bribing government officials in Azerbaijan in a failed attempt to take over the state oil company known as Socar...

Cornering The Kleptocrats, Part I

Posted on March 19, 2009
Only bribe-payers can be prosecuted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; bribe-takers are excluded. Congress wrote the FCPA that way because it believed "the efforts expended in resolving the diplomatic, jurisdictional, and enforcement difficulties that would arise upon the prosecution of foreign officials was not worth the minimal deterrent value of such prosecutions...

Combating Caribbean Corruption

Posted on March 17, 2009
The U.K. government is in the process of assuming direct rule over its Caribbean dependency, the Turks and Caicos Islands. A U.K. Commission of Inquiry found "clear signs of political amorality and immaturity" in the government there. The BBC said chief minister Michael Misick is alleged to have "built up a multi-million dollar fortune since coming to power in 2003...

Paris Pulls The Plug On Enforcement

Posted on March 16, 2009
We're trying to stay calm today but it's not easy. We just learned why France -- the largest country by area in the European Union and second largest by population, possessor of the fifth biggest economy in the world, a founding member of the European Union and the United Nations, a permanent member of the Security Council and member of the G8, NATO, and the Latin Union (whatever that is) -- why that France, isn't prosecuting any foreign public bribery...

The Case For More Compliance

Posted on March 15, 2009
The pressure these days to comply with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other anti-corruption laws is coming from several directions at once. Last week we mentioned whistleblower hotlines as one example. But there are other reasons why it's harder than ever for companies to cheat and for bride-taking officials to hide their crimes...

Wondering About Whistleblowers

Posted on March 12, 2009
Earlier this week, we mentioned the importance of whistleblower hotlines (here). How much are they used for bribery and corruption complaints? We haven't found any recent statistics. But we think the numbers must be significant (judging by the number of open investigations everywhere)...

On The Subject Of Resources

Posted on March 11, 2009
We've mentioned before Dan Newcomb's FCPA Digest, calling it the most definitive publicly-available catalog of FCPA prosecutions, enforcement actions and disclosed investigations. So it's great to see the release of the March 2009 version, available here...

Compliance Is The New Norm

Posted on March 10, 2009
Raymond Fisman, left, is a professor at the Columbia Business School. In a commentary last week in Forbes titled When Corruption Is The Norm, he had this to say about Morgan Stanley's compliance problems in China: "The . . . head office has taken the view that this was the rogue act of a rogue individual, and an internal investigation revealed that 'questionable activity was isolated to a discrete set of real estate transactions in China...

A Blight On Their Lives

Posted on March 09, 2009
Dan Bilefsky of the New York Times is a roving reporter with a knack for revealing the heart of things. He's done that now for the problem of petty corruption in Romania. His story is about the human consequences of the countless little bribes so often ignored and unreported, and categorized as those pesky and insignificant facilitating payments...

Kenya, Corruption And Global Security

Posted on March 08, 2009
A Reuters report said FBI Director Robert Mueller made a one-day visit to Kenya last week. After meeting with the prime minister, Mueller was quoted as saying, "We discussed what could be described as the unhealthy climate of impunity here in Kenya and steps that can be taken to investigate and to prosecute public corruption...

KBR's U.K. Middlemen Indicted

Posted on March 05, 2009

Sounding Off About Third Party Compliance

Posted on March 04, 2009

Another Look At Argo-Tech v. Yamada

Posted on March 03, 2009

The SEC Takes It Back

Posted on March 02, 2009

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