Oracle Corporation will pay more than $23 million to settle charges it violated parts of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act when its Turkish, Emirati and Indian subsidiaries used slush funds to bribe foreign officials for business from 2016 to 2019, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced. The company agreed to pay around $8 million in disgorgement and a $15 million penalty, along with agreeing to "cease and desist" from violating the anti-bribery, books and records and internal accounting controls elements of the FCPA, SEC said. Oracle did so without admitting or denying the SEC findings.
A Foreign Corrupt Practices Act case showed the limits that a request under a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) can have for tolling a statute of limitations, two Holland & Knight attorneys said in an Aug. 29 blog post. The attorneys, Wifredo Ferrer and Gary Klubok, wrote that a recent district court decision tossing four counts of FCPA and other violation allegations on the grounds that the government cannot use multiple MLATs as a tool to extend tolling offers lessons for defense attorneys: criteria for when MLAT tolling orders end, and that MLAT tolling is offense-specific and not person-specific.
The U.S. is investigating at least 100 cases involving violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, an FCPA Blog post said Aug. 22. The blog, which pulled data from FCPA Tracker, said 20 new active investigations have been disclosed since the start of 2020, including four companies involved in the oil and gas industry, two defense contractors, two medical device makers and two telecommunications companies. Half the 20 new disclosures came from companies based in the U.S.
The Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation into Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson's conduct in Iraq in 2019, the company said in a June 9 filing. The SEC told Ericsson it "has opened an investigation concerning the matters described in the company's 2019 Iraq investigation report." Ericsson responded that while "it is too early to determine or predict the outcome of the investigation," the company is "fully cooperating with the SEC."
The Securities and Exchange Commission last week fined Tenaris, a Luxembourg-based manufacturer of steel pipe products, more than $78 million for alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Employees and agents of Tenaris’ Brazilian subsidiary allegedly paid about $10.4 million in bribes to a Brazilian government official involved with the bidding process at Petrobras, Brazil’s state-owned petroleum company, the SEC said June 2.
Resolutions involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act have continued at a “slow” pace in 2022, with only one announced FCPA-related corporate enforcement action during the first quarter of 2022, Miller & Chevalier said in its FCPA Spring Review released May 25. DOJ announced just two bribery-related guilty pleas in the first quarter and two FCPA-related indictments, the firm said. “This pace is consistent with the slower pace of such cases in 2021 and is well behind the pace that marked recent higher volume years such as from 2017 to 2019.”
The Department of Justice this week released the 2021 year in review for its Fraud Section, detailing the agency's work on cases involving the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The review includes statistics on prosecuted FCPA cases, information on new officials who joined the FCPA Unit last year, and a list of “significant” corporate resolutions, individual indictments and guilty pleas.
Companies looking to comply with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act should be prepared for a “surge” in government enforcement and activity this year after a relatively quiet 2021, Kramer Levin said in a December alert. Although the U.S.’s recent downward trend in FCPA enforcement activity continued last year with just 15 related actions, the Biden administration may have set the stage for increased enforcement during the rest of its term, the firm said. Not only did the administration recently announce several initiatives aimed at combating corruption -- including a new strategy to better curb illicit finance (see 2112060018) -- it also significantly added to the Department of Justice’s FCPA unit in March.
Afework Bereket, former employee of Swedish telecommunications giant Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson and dual citizen of Ethiopia and Sweden, was indicted for his alleged role in a bribery scheme to pay off government officials in Djibouti, the Department of Justice said Sept. 8. Bereket allegedly engaged in the scheme from 2010 to 2014 in which he served as Ericsson's account manager for the Horn of Africa. He purportedly bribed two high-level officials in the small African nation's executive branch and one at its state-owned telecommunications company to win a contract valued at around $24 million. The scheme involved Bereket and others allegedly leading an Ericsson subsidiary to enter into a fraudulent contract with a consulting company that then signed off on fake invoices to hide the bribe payments, DOJ said. The bribe payments were routed through bank accounts in the U.S. to hide the funds, it said.
The Department of Justice last week moved David Last to officially head the Fraud Section’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Unit, The Wall Street Journal reported Aug. 12. Last has been serving as acting unit chief since April. A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment. Last’s appointment is the latest effort by DOJ to staff its FCPA unit with “experienced prosecutors,” Wiley Rein said. The agency has added six new assistant chiefs since the beginning of this year, which “reinforce the current Administration’s focus on proactive FCPA enforcement” and its belief that anti-corruption is a “core national security interest.”