Richard Bistrong | Contributing Editor
Richard Bistrong spent his career as an international sales executive and currently consults, writes and speaks on foreign bribery and compliance issues from that front-line perspective.
He was named to Compliance Week’s list of Top Minds in 2017 and was one of Ethisphere’s 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics in 2015.
Richard was the vice president of international sales for a large, publicly traded defense supplier, which included residing in the UK and extensive overseas travel.
In 2007, as part of a cooperation agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice and subsequent Immunity from Prosecution in the UK, Richard assisted the U.S., UK, and other governments in understanding how FCPA and other bribery and export violations occurred in international sales.
In 2012, after the collapse of the Africa Sting prosecution, Richard was sentenced as part of his own plea agreement, and served fourteen-and-a-half months at a U.S. federal prison camp.
He holds an MA in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia.
Richard writes about current anti-bribery and compliance issues at www.richardbistrong.com. Information about his consulting practice, Front-Line Anti-Bribery LLC, can also be found on that website.
Recent Posts

Global compliance e-learning series wins prestigious training award
When Mastercard began producing videos to depict chapters of my FCPA violations, eventual guilty plea, and other anti-bribery violations, they took corporate compliance training to

I ‘won’ business for all the wrong reasons, and still regret it
During my time as a cooperating witness, I testified about a certain transaction in Bolivia. It was for a water-cannon, otherwise known as a riot

Hitting the FCPA wall and finding the true center of my life
At 50, I sat in prison for violating the FCPA, among other offenses, due to no one’s fault but my own. At 40, I had

Mastercard’s popular compliance training series expands with new video
An award-winning compliance training series expands this month as Mastercard and Front-Line Anti-Bribery LLC explore the potential perils of everyday activities. “Ordinary Situations, Extraordinary Risk” depicts

Bribes worth nothing that don’t happen can also be crimes
A recent FCPA Blog post explained how, by a “quirk of American jurisprudence, something worth less than a cup of coffee or taxi fare can

‘Compliance Corner’ training videos win two Communicator Awards
The ethics and compliance training video series, Compliance Corner, which last year won a Silver Telly award for Corporate Training honoring excellence in video and

Resource Alert: New compliance training videos focus on misuse of non-public corporate information
The award-winning e-learning series Compliance Corner has followed the success of its first release with a second series of videos, this time about the perils

The dangerous allure of being a corporate hero
Former Goldman Sachs partner Tim Leissner testified at Roger Ng’s IMDB-related trial that he wanted to become a “hero” at the bank for bringing in

Are you entitled to more pay? My compensation ‘shortcut’ landed me in prison
A German court recently ordered a fund manager who was convicted of insider trading to repay almost six times the illicit profits he made by

I remember thinking, where did everyone go?
Dick Cassin warned in a post that we shouldn’t expect agents to keep quiet about the bribes they pay, to which I would also add, if