Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: News and Developments
By Ralph J. Caccia and Gregory M. Williams
As regular feature moving forward, we will include in the newsletter an update on developments related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). We will use this inaugural update to preview two upcoming FCPA publications. The first is FCPA: Year in Review, which will be published later this month. The Year in Review summarizes enforcement actions brought against corporations and individuals in 2015, highlighting the most significant cases and government statements concerning the state of this important area of the law. It is designed to be comprehensive in scope, but sufficiently succinct to provide a basic understanding of the current enforcement climate in an easily digestible form.
The second, Pocket Part to the FCPA Resource Guide, is a unique publication that we will release in February. In November 2012, the Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission released the Resource Guide to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (Guide), addressing a broad range of topics regarding the interpretation and enforcement of the FCPA. Given the paucity of judicial precedent under the FCPA, the government’s pronouncements regarding the meaning of the anti-corruption law carry substantial weight. U.S. officials, however, have announced that they do not intend to update or supplement the Guide. Wiley Rein, therefore, has created a “Pocket Part” to address subsequent FCPA developments. The Pocket Part will not summarize the factual details of every FCPA matter. Rather, it will selectively address the key FCPA settled actions and other related developments that either underscore the central lessons of the Guide or illustrate developing trends in FCPA enforcement. The document is intended to sit on your shelf next to Guide as a resource for counsel and compliance professionals confronting challenging FCPA compliance and investigatory questions.
