Recent Media Coverage of the FCPA Blog and our Editors
“The investigations have caused a stir in the country as some of them have already been made public, including Odebrecht, the former CEO of PEMEX and the Chairman of AHMSA – the largest integrated steel producer of Mexico, reports the FCPA Blog.”
Read the full story from the OCCRP here
“Another institution that plays an important role is the media. Smaller organizations that report on corruption are emerging beside the major news outlets. For example, the FCPA Blog publishes news, commentary, and research findings to help compliance professionals, business leaders, and others understand how anticorruption laws work, how corruption arises, and how it affects people and organizations.”
Read the full story from the Harvard Business Review here
“If there is a circumstance under which the difference between a direct sale and third-party sale is double, that’s a red flag,” said Richard Bistrong, who went to prison for bribing foreign officials and now advises companies trying to beef up compliance.”
Read the full story from the New York Times here
“Seven of the 10 biggest fines in the FCPA’s 41-year-existence have been imposed in the last five years, according to the specialist website FCPA Blog. Since 2010, the SEC has rewarded whistleblowers with up to 30% of any fine imposed, encouraging a rise in employee reporting.”
Read the full story from The Wall Street Journal here
“The ambiguity is there,” said Vera Cherepanova, a compliance consultant based in Milan who wrote a paper for the FCPA Blog on how GDPR will affect the whistleblowing process. “For compliance officers, the problem is that we are not the center. We are not the key concept of the GDPR and basically no one is issuing any official information for us.”
Read the full story from The Wall Street Journal here
“An American anticorruption expert has praised South Korea’s anticorruption law known as the Kim Young-ran Act.
Writing on The FCPA Blog, of which he is a senior editor, Andy Spalding said that traditionally known as an economic “Asian tiger,” South Korea may now be an anticorruption tiger.”
Read the full story from KBS World Radio here
The McDonnell case opened the door to the point where selling access is now essentially legal,” said Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University Law School who teaches an anti-corruption seminar. Ms. Tillipman noted that the government has repeatedly gone after companies like Walmart and Alcoa for bribing foreign officials. “But our Supreme Court,” she added, “has made it incredibly difficult to prosecute corruption in our own country.”
Read the full story from the New York Times here
The stolen wealth can still be seized and returned to benefit the populations whose property it rightly is. Added The FCPA Blog’s Martin Kenney, the ‘Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative is now paying dividends. Any government initiative to undermine embezzlement, corruption, and bribery deserves credit.'”
Read the full story from Kleptocracy Initiative here
Contributing Editor Bill Steinman on MSNBC: The Beat with Ari Melber
Watch the full segment here.
“At $300 million, the proposed settlement wouldn’t be among the largest such penalties. The top 10 largest FCPA settlements are $365 million or larger, according to cases compiled the FCPA Blog, a trade publication.”
Read the full story from Fox Business here
“The 2028 Olympic Games achieved a milestone more than a decade before they’re held: They are the first Olympic Games to require, by contractual obligation, its host city to prevent corruption, as the FCPA Blog noted last week. . . . . . The FCPA Blog said the move was “several steps in the making,” thanks in large part to German lawyer Sylvia Schenk, a former Olympic track runner who works for the sports anti-corruption effort at Transparency International. “This new contractual language may be Sylvia’s greatest Olympic achievement,” said the post, written by Andy Spaulding, who is a professor at the University of Richmond’s law school and a lecturer at the International Anti-Corruption Academy.”
Read the full story from the Wall Street Journal here
“It is important to avoid both actual and perceived conflicts of interest,” said Shruti Shah, vice president for programs and operations at the U.S. branch of Transparency International, “This is a non-partisan principle.”
Read the full story on The Huffington Post here.
Jessica Tillipman, a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in government ethics, said the Old Post Office deal poses a massive conflict of interest for a President Trump. “You’d be kidding yourself if you don’t think the president of the United States has influence over this,” she says. “And he’s taken no affirmative steps to separate himself from this conflict of interest. I don’t know how this is not a bigger issue. It’s crazy.”
Read the full story from Mother Jones here.
“It just raises the standard of prosecution to a very, very high level,” said Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at the George Washington University Law School who teaches an anti-corruption seminar. “I think it’s going to make it a lot easier for politicians to accept gifts and hospitality and payments in return for taking action.”
Read the full story from The Washington Post here.
Contributing Editor Richard Bistrong on PowerLunch with CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera: Unaoil
“It’s totally unexpected,” said Richard Cassin, an expert on foreign-bribery law who writes about FCPA cases, referring to the unlikelihood of a large criminal fine or charges against any Wal-Mart executives. “There weren’t a lot of outright denials from the company…There was a big assumption that with Wal-Mart, where there was smoke there was fire.”
Read the full story from the Wall Street Journal here.
Senior Editor Jessica Tillipman on GPS with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria
Watch the full segment here.
“Most large-scale bribery investigations focus on the use of intermediaries,” said Richard L. Cassin, who is editor of the FCPA Blog and a lawyer who specializes in such cases. But he said that the accusation by Chinese authorities that Glaxo channeled as much as 3 billion renminbi (about $489 million) through more than 700 travel agencies makes this case more egregious than most. “The question of 700 travel agencies, it’s an astounding number,” he said.
Read the full story from the New York Times here.
Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University School of Law, and an expert on the FCPA, said that with the changes in its Russian office, Cisco may be trying to minimize risks of corruption. “Typically, with the government in these long term investigations,” she said, “not only are they investigating what happened but they are putting practices and procedures in place to try to demonstrate that it won’t happen again.”
Read the full story from BuzzFeed News here.
“I’ve never heard of that many potential targets of an investigation no matter how big,” said Richard Cassin, an anti-corruption lawyer and author of a popular blog on the law at issue, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
“Those numbers suggest DOJ is really digging deep,” he said.
Read the full story from the Huffington Post here.
Jessica Tillipman has been blogging hard about the Virginia disclosure rules for the FCPA blog, and she points out that the commonwealth’s F is well-earned:
“Per the State Integrity Investigation, [Virginia] is one of only nine states without a statewide ethics commission and one of four states without campaign finance limits. Moreover, according to the National Conference of State Legislators, Virginia is one of just ten states in the country that, as noted above, does not limit the value of personal gifts provided to elected officials.”.
Read the full story from Slate here.
“As the Voice of America’s ‘Corruption Correspondent,’ my daily morning read-in of the FCPA Blog is invaluable. Richard Cassin and his colleagues provide constantly fresh rosters of breaking stories and developments in the transparency and accountability sphere. Many of my best stories began as a spark provided by the FCPA Blog.”
But Richard Cassin, an expert on the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and author of a popular FCPA blog, said China had drawn a line in the sand for foreign companies.
“The China investigation and detentions of executives of a giant Western company will shake up anyone responsible for compliance,” he said.
Read the full story from the Chicago Tribune here.
“Jessica Tillipman teaches corruption law at George Washington University and is the senior editor of The FCPA Blog. Told of the allegations about Cisco, she said, “It’s full of red flags. It’s got the typical factors you see in FCPA cases: big rebates, offshore payments, government agencies.”
Read the full story from BuzzFeed here.
“Bourke’s prosecution helped put the FCPA on center stage,” Richard Cassin, a lawyer who writes the FCPA Blog, said in an e-mail. “He was the DOJ’s biggest catch under the statute. More than anyone else, he made the once-obscure law famous.”
Read the full story from Bloomberg Businessweek here.
Richard Cassin is a lawyer who represents companies in these types of cases. He says in order to avoid prosecution, companies often end up cleaning house. That is, they get rid of employees who engaged in the bribery or in its cover-up. He says a dramatic recent case involved the electronics maker Siemens.
Listen to the full story on NPR here.
“Wal-Mart de Mexico didn’t stumble into a bit of bribery. If the allegations are correct, it used systematic bribery as part of its business strategy as a way to grow,” said Richard Cassin, an FCPA expert and author of a popular FCPA blog.
Read the full story from Reuters here.
Extradition is “a real hole in the government’s efforts to nail individuals,” said Richard Cassin, a lawyer and the author of a popular FCPA blog.
Read the full story from the Wall Street Journal here.
“The first thing I thought of was, ‘Oh God, did I eat a piece of this Mexican chicken?’ ” said Richard L. Cassin, a lawyer who specializes in foreign bribery cases and writes the FCPA Blog on issues related to the foreign corruption statute.”
Read the full story from the New York Times here.
“Whether News Corp. executives could face criminal prosecution would depend on the usual question that comes up in a scandal: What did they know and when did they know it? In other words, an executive would “have to have had direct knowledge of the illegal activity,” like whether they authorized payments or tried to cover it up, said attorney Richard L. Cassin, a specialist in FCPA who also writes FCPA Blog.”
Read the full story from Variety here.
The Lockheed affair and the shocking outcome of Sporkin’s detective work both contributed to a sense that reform was necessary. As Andrew Spalding, a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, has written, U.S. policy makers worried that such rank corruption would become a Cold War liability both by harming our relationship with allies and by discrediting capitalism.
Read the full story from The Atlantic here.
This is a hefty deterrent to doing business in poor countries, some studies have found. Andy Spalding, a law professor at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, likens the way the FCPA is enforced to “de facto sanctions” on countries where corruption is rife.
Read the full story from The Economist here.
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The firm will have to pay for an internal investigation to satisfy the American government. This may need to span the world, not just Mexico, and it may have to report the results in real time to the Justice Department, reckons Richard Cassin of Cassin Law. Such probes cost a lot: an estimated $1 billion in the case of Germany’s Siemens.
Read the full story from The Economist here.
“Definitely, anti-corruption has been high up on the enforcement agenda recently,” says Richard Cassin, a FCPA expert whose blog produced the list of companies that have disclosed investigations. “This area of law used to be an obscure specialty. Now every big law firm has a practice.”
Read the full story from CNN Money here.
“A corporate attitude toward the corruption there that allowed a cover-up to happen could signal wider compliance problems,” said Cassin, who writes an industry blog, FCPA Blog.
Read the full story from the Chicago Tribune here.
Watch Andy Spalding’s full interview with “After the Bell” on Fox Business here.
From 1991 to 2010, each of the dozens of publicly traded companies criminally accused under the law has reached a settlement that enabled it to pay a fine and avoid trial, said Richard Cassin, an attorney who’s the creator and principal author of the FCPA Blog.
Read the full story from USA Today here.
“If we had more judicial interpretations of the law, companies would have a clearer idea of the barriers and the bright lines,” says attorney Richard L. Cassin, founder and principal writer for the FCPA Blog.
Read the full story from The Daily Beast here.
“…the FCPA Blog, a site that provides practical information about the FCPA and compliance.”
Read the full story from Business Insider here.
“People have talked themselves into the idea that they can win these cases and so far there is no evidence that this is true,” said Richard Cassin, a lawyer who helps clients comply with the FCPA and runs a blog on the act.”
Read to full story from Reuters here.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission could seek to enforce the part of the foreign bribery law that requires companies to keep accurate books, Cassin said. If News Corp. employees disguised bribe payments with accounting tricks, the SEC may have grounds to fine the company.”
Read the full story from the Los Angeles Times here.
The banks are not attacking the entire Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” explains Richard L Cassin, publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog, a highly regarded website providing news and commentary concerning white-collar crime, enforcement, and compliance.
Read the full story from FTSE Global Markets here.
“That’s because U.S. authorities trust the British legal system, older than America itself, to handle the case. America usually goes after cases that are not being prosecuted elsewhere and in which widespread, systematic bribery can be proved, Cassin said. News Corporation, he said, does not fit the bill.”
Read the full story from CNN here.
Historically most Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases have involved contracts with foreign governments, mineral extraction or manufacturing facilities. But with capital for finance companies drying up amid the financial meltdown, Richard L. Cassin, author of the FCPA Blog, noted in 2008 that interactions with sovereign wealth funds might trigger problems with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Read the full story from DealBook here.
“But American lawyer Richard Cassin warned Wall Street’s fierce regulator, The Securities and Exchange Commission, could seek to enforce the part of the foreign bribery law that requires companies to keep accurate books, according to the LA Times newspaper.”
Read the full story from The Daily Mail here.
“I am never going to be a leading authority on the FCPA, yet because it is of such paramount importance to our clients doing business in China, it is imperative we stay current on what is happening on the FCPA front so we can help our clients set up preventative measures. One of my primary ways of doing that is to regularly read the FCPA Blog. It fills “the blog space” on the FCPA.”
Read the full story from the China Law Blog here.
10 Best Industry Risk Blogs
“Its (The FCPA Blog) simple name leaves no guesses as to what it covers — news and views about the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Managed by Richard Cassin, the multiple daily posts gives readers a grim reminder of the oft-corrupt corporate world and analysis of the FCPA’s actions”.
Read the full story from the Risk Management Monitor here.
“The Folks…who produce the FCPA Blog have an interesting take on Monday’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act conviction of husband-and-wife film producers…”
Read the full story from Am Law Daily here.
“I think [increased FCPA enforcement] was a response to the dangers in the world,” said Cassin, who also writes at the FCPA Blog. “And also I think it was a message to foreign leaders that they had to begin to police their corporations—or we would.”
Read the full story from The Crime Report here.
“Richard Cassin, creator of the FCPA Blog and a pioneer of the FCPA’s blogosphere, hit the ball out of the park with this recent column for Ethisphere.”
Read the full story from the FCPA Professor here.
“The Collar for Blogs That Should Be Nominated for Some Award — To The D & O Diary (written by Kevin LaCroix) and The FCPA Blog (written by Dick Cassin), both outstanding for their thorough, balanced posts that are uniformly informative — they deserve recognition for the service they provide to readers…”
Read the full story from the White Collar Crime Prof Blog here.