On his fine Crime, Corruption & Compliance blog, former federal prosecutor Michael Volkov had this to say about the Lindsey case:
I am sorry to burst everyone’s bubble but the Lindsey decision does not reflect any repudiation or cut back in FCPA enforcement. To the contrary, Judge Matz’s decision was in response to ”standard” prosecutorial misconduct violations.
Nothing in Judge Matz’s decision had anything to do with the Justice Department’s aggressive FCPA enforcement program.
Putting all this aside, the Lindsey decision will have an impact on the professional status and careers of the prosecutors involved in the case, especially the prosecutor(s) responsible for the pre-indictment investigation. There is no excuse for failing to turn over the grand jury testimony of the FBI case agents and for including false statements in the various affidavits supporting search warrants. Repeated claims of mistakes, oversight and inadvertent errors have a hollow ring.
The full post is here.
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Jeff Kaplan on his Conflict of Interest Blog is writing about conflicts in a way that’s opening the subject to us for the first time.
In a recent post he said:
Samuel Johnson once famously said of some unfortunate soul, “He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others,” and in this posting we’ll examine how companies can avoid the misfortune that sometimes comes from causing conflicts of interests in others.
To start, a brief bit of COI history.
Several years ago an advertising agency lost a highly lucrative account with Wal-Mart and – according to some press accounts at the time – part of the reason for the loss was the agency’s entertaining of a Wal-Mart executive in ways that allegedly caused her to violate that company’s code of conduct. Although the agency presumably violated no law, its loss of future revenue could be seen as costly as some of the largest criminal fines in history. . . .
The COI Blog is here.
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