On The Subject Of Resources

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.

This year, Philip Urofsky becomes editor-in-chief. He told us last week, “In this Digest, we entirely scrapped the previous Trends & Patterns, which had largely become a statistical update, and replaced it with a more analytical piece.” The T&P section has always been a favorite of ours, and this year’s new-and-improved version (available here) didn’t disappoint.

About the prosecution of individuals, for example, it said:

More recently, there is a strong trend of actions against individuals being brought separately or even in advance of charges against their employers and then, in all likelihood, following classic prosecutorial strategy of working up the chain of command, using the individuals to build the government’s case against their superiors and eventually the company. In Willbros, the DOJ charged four employees over a two-year period, with two pleading in previous years (Steph and Brown) and an indictment being returned against two others (Tillery and Novak) in February 2008. Finally, in May 2008, Willbros Group and Willbros International agreed to a deferred prosecution agreement. Similarly, the DOJ entered into a plea agreement with the former CEO of KBR, Stanley, in 2008, well in advance of settling the matter with Halliburton/KBR in early 2009.

And concerning disgorgement, a topic we recently talked about here, it said:

A final trend and pattern worth noting is the SEC’s continued demand for disgorgement of ill-gotten profits in cases in which only books & records violations are charged, such as in the [oil for food] cases. Whether or not a false entry in a company’s books and records (or a failure to implement adequate internal controls) truly results in increased profits is open to question. To date, however, no FCPA defendant has publicly challenged the SEC on whether disgorgement is appropriate when the sole charge is false books and records. Prior to the ABB case in 2004, the SEC had never collected disgorgement in FCPA cases; since then it has sought it in virtually every case with only a few exceptions, such as Dow Chemical, Delta & Pine Land, Lucent, and Conway. In Tyco, the SEC collected $1 in ill-gotten gains (along with $50 million in penalties related to other violations). While this is an isolated example of the SEC seeking such nominal disgorgement, the case does underscore the overall policy of levying disgorgement sanctions in nearly all cases against issuers.

We spend a lot of time in the FCPA Digest. And whenever we turn to it, we’re grateful for the hard work and generosity of founding-editor Dan Newcomb, Philip Urofsky and their entire team.
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