The blogs spoke loudly in an article by Leslie Wayne in the New York Times that recently highlighted FCPA enforcement against foreign companies.
Taking a page from our top ten list, Wayne said:
The companies that have reached the biggest settlements under the law, known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, include Siemens, the German engineering giant; Daimler, the maker of Mercedes-Benz vehicles; Alcatel-Lucent, the French telecommunications company; and the JGC Corporation, a Japanese consulting company. The lone American company in the top 10 is KBR, the former Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the Texas oil services company. As a group, they have paid nearly $3.2 billion in settlements.
The FCPA Blog’s senior editor Andy Spalding said in the story:
“These big settlements are with sprawling, multinational companies,” said Andy Spalding, a law professor at the University of Richmond and a contributing editor to the FCPA Blog, which tracks the top settlements. “Yet they are based, in part, in the United States. A culture of compliance may be slower to take in other countries, and many are not aware of the rapid escalation of FCPA cases or its broad jurisdictional scope.”
Jeff Kaplan, who writes the excellent Conflict of Interest Blog, also appeared in Wayne’s story:
[T]here was “something strange” about the fact that nine of the top 10 settlements involved foreign companies. But he added that when the specifics of the cases were examined, “no one would feel sorry for these companies.”
And Mike Koehler, the FCPA Professor, weighed in as well. He called FCPA mega-settlements “cash cows” for the U.S. government.
“Even more,” he said in the article, “the U.S. feels that if the home countries are not going to prosecute, the U.S. has a moral obligation to do so.”
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‘Foreign Firms Most Affected by a U.S. Law Barring Bribes’ by Leslie Wayne in the New York Times can be found here.
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