Walmart shifted into full damage-control mode, following allegations of a massive bribery and corruption campaign at its Mexico operations and an attempt to conceal payments to foreign officials, which first surfaced this weekend in a New York Times report. Yesterday Walmart announced that it was appointing a global FCPA compliance officer position. This position, which […]
Anti-Bribery
Posted inAnti-Bribery
Finding the Corruption Needle in the Haystack
Beryl Markham was a 20th Century female adventurer and one of the first pilots to fly solo and non-stop across the Atlantic (she did it from east to west against prevailing winds). Markham also knew how to turn a phrase. “The way to find a needle in a haystack,” she once said, “is to sit […]
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Targeting the Demand for Facilitation Payments
A consortium of compliance executives primarily from the energy industry is taking aim at one of the most vexing headaches businesses face today: facilitation payments. Facilitation payments—more commonly called “grease payments”—are small sums given to foreign officials to expedite normal business transactions, such as clearing goods through customs. They differ from bribes, which are typically […]
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Anti-Corruption Programs Enable Business Agility
One of the most frequently asked questions I hear about managing corruption risk demonstrates the compliance profession’s passion for benchmarking: “What do companies with the best anti-corruption programs do differently?” The answer I give does not offer details about process or technology, at least not directly; instead, it boils down to philosophy and vision. Compliance, […]
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SciClone Raises Standards, and Eyebrows, With FCPA Deal
Find a company that has established a robust compliance program in recent years, and it’s a fair bet that federal prosecutors provided the, ahem, motivation to do so. But once in a great while, a company adopts such programs to appease shareholders. Such were the circumstances faced by SciClone Pharmaceuticals, which has agreed to adopt […]
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Germany Creates a Standard for Compliance Assurance
With some of Germany’s best-known companies rocked by bribery and corruption scandals in recent years, the danger of a compliance system failure has become a growing concern inside the country’s boardrooms. German companies have been investing to improve their compliance systems in response and have turned to audit firms for help designing them and for […]
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The Dos and Don’ts of Corporate Hospitality
Rigorous enforcement activity against those who run afoul of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is apparently causing some compliance executives to second-guess even routine compliance decisions on corporate hospitality. That’s what many in the compliance community make of the Justice Department’s first FCPA advisory opinion release of 2011, which reiterates two nearly identical opinion releases […]
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British Regulator Issues Record Corruption Fine
*/ /*–>*/ Britain’s Financial Services Authority has slapped a record £7m fine on one of the country’s biggest insurance brokers for failing to have good internal controls to prevent corruption. The regulator said Willis Limited had not done enough to monitor £27m of payments to third parties in Russia and Egypt who helped it win […]
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Courts Reject Claim that Bribery Raids Were Unlawful
*/ /*–>*/ The UK Serious Fraud Office can restart its bribery investigation into Alstom after the courts refused a legal challenge from two of the engineering company’s directors. Stephen Burgin, Alstom’s UK president, and Robert Purcell, its finance director, were trying to challenge the way the SFO had conducted dawn raids on their homes last […]
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Canada Takes Landmark Anti-Bribery Enforcement Action
Amid mounting international pressure to toughen its anti-corruption efforts, Canadian authorities have rendered their first significant conviction under Canada’s Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act since its passage in 1999, a harbinger of more enforcement activity to come. “It’s been relatively quiet until now,” says John Boscariol of law firm McCarthy Tétrault in Toronto. “I […]
