In late February, the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission announced a resolution of a longstanding FCPA probe into the Dutch telecom giant VimpelCom for a spectacular, longstanding bribery scheme where the company garnered the rights to the mobile communications business in Uzbekistan. The multiple bribery schemes used appear to have been approved at the highest levels of the company and should provide a wealth of case studies on bribery schemes for the compliance professional going forward. Indeed, the total fines and penalties exceeded $795 million.
This is one of the very few FCPA enforcement actions that rose to the level of a company’s board of directors. Given the requirements of the Yates Memo and the legal concept of conscious avoidance, I wonder how long it will be before the Justice Department begins to look at board members who not only failed to ask the right compliance questions but also failed to follow up when they asked the right questions initially.
