The SEC continues its cutting edge FCPA enforcement program, bringing in a variety of enforcement cases and employing some new strategies. In its latest foray, the SEC settled with Las Vegas Sands, owned by Sheldon Adelson, for $9 million for deficiencies in its internal accounting controls concerning its operations in China and Macao. The SEC’s enforcement action reflects one important theme – they could not...

Hui Chen, the Department of Justice’s Compliance Counsel, recently stated that 2015 was the year of due diligence and third-party compliance. A recent survey conducted by Kroll and Ethisphere provided a status check on how the due diligence compliance effort is going. Many companies have heard the message about the importance of due diligence compliance and instituted due diligence systems, hopefully using automated programs. Companies...

Akin to politics (to a smaller degree), there is a fair amount of disinformation, some call it bloviating, put out by the FCPA Paparazzi. Some of this disinformation is motivated by immature attempts to “market” legal services; other sources of disinformation carry a readily apparent bias, one way or the other, and usually are supported by self-citations to one’s own “scholarship” to prove their points....

Showing my age again, Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run included a hilarious scene when Woody’s parents wearing Groucho Marx glasses talk about their criminal son (Woody/Virgil Starkwell), his dad exclaimed “He’s rotten, he is a gangster.”  See clip here. Well, the story of Valeant Pharmaceuticals is a familiar one of corporate greed and misconduct, based on a “rotten” tone at the top and...

Last week, the SEC announced another FCPA settlement involving the pharmaceutical industry for bribery in China. The SEC’s settlement filing represents yet another example of the pharmaceutical industry run amok in China, relying on targeted gifts, meals, entertainment and travel expenditures designed to increase sales of Novartis products in China. Novartis had to cough up $25 million. The Novartis enforcement action, however, provides an important...

There are many important predictors of corporate culture. Everyone laments the difficult in measuring a company’s culture. There are a few issues, however, that may be inconvertible as a predictor of a corporate culture. How does a company react to a whistleblower? I am sure everyone is saying to themselves – well, we do not have that problem,  we are committed to fair treatment of...

We have all been reading (over and over) about the Yates Memorandum and the renewed focus on individual culpability. As I have said (over and over), the proof will be in the results – if we see an increased number of criminal cases against individuals. Whether this new aggressive approach will extend to senior executives and even corporate board members will be a matter of...

FCPA enforcement actions run the gamut of fact patterns and structured resolutions. We are in the midst of a transformation in the overall settlement environment with an expected increase in individual prosecutions. On the one side, we have a tough and comprehensive DOJ and SEC settlement against VimpelCom. The conduct within VimpelCom was pervasive and occurred at every level of the company, including the board....

The VimpelCom FCPA settlement underscored the importance of Compliance 2.0 and the need to reform board deliberations and governance. No one can read the facts without shaking their heads and asking – what was the VimpelCom board thinking? The VimpelCom board’s failure to act reflects the key driving force inside the corporate boardroom – defense. When a company is not being led by the board...

The Vimpelcom FCPA enforcement action is stunning in its breadth and the brazen nature of the bribery scheme. It is hard to accept that such conduct stretched into 2011 to 2013, given the significant emphasis placed on anti-corruption enforcement in the corporate governance world. It is easy to ask but hard to imagine how many other major companies are operating with such flimsy attention to...