International Trade Law News

The latest issue of the well-respected Corporate Crime Reporter contains a summary of Justice Department attorney Mark F. Mendelsohn's comments made recently at a Foreign Corrupt Practices Program (FCPA) in Washington, DC. Mendelsohn serves as Deputy Chief of the Justice Department's Fraud Section and oversees the criminal enforcement of the FCPA.

The article contains some interesting and important information on recent and future FCPA trends, such as:

Mendelsohn said the trend toward more bribery prosecutions is going to continue “given the significant number of matters that we have under investigation.”

And he said the trend toward more prosecutions of individuals – as opposed to corporations – is a result of explicit Department policy.

“The number of individual prosecutions has risen – and that’s not an accident,” Mendelsohn said. “That is quite intentional on the part of the Department. It is our view that to have a credible deterrent effect, people have to go to jail. People have to be prosecuted where appropriate. This is a federal crime. This is not fun and games.”

“We have come up some creative ways to try to resolve cases involving companies so that we are no longer faced with a binary decision to either charge a company or not charge a company,” Mendelsohn said. “We have crafted resolutions – non prosecution agreements, deferred prosecution agreements, corporate compliance monitors – we have come up with tools that provide positive incentives for responsible companies to self-disclose, to self- investigate, to remediate appropriately. And that has had an enormous impact on the number of companies that have been willing to come in an talk to us about the problems they are identifying in their operations.”

“Another factor is that we have been increasingly effective in gathering evidence overseas through treaties as well as informal arrangements with law enforcement in other countries. That has made our work easier. Foreign law enforcement authorities are beginning to investigate and prosecute their own cases. That has had a positive effect on our efforts."

Labels: FCPA