Senator Arlen Specter will chair a hearing of the Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, November 30th.
The hearing, "Examining Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" will be held at 9:30 a.m. in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building and a webcast of the hearing can be seen here.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to be one of the witnesses testifying at the hearing.
Other witnesses are: Greg Andres (DOJ - Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division), Andrew Weissmann (Jenner & Block); and Michael Volkov (Mayer Brown).
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The Honorable Senator wants individuals to be punished as a deterrent, but loses sight of the fact that these Companies aren't convicted of an FCPA violation, as the FCPA Professor pointed out in a previous post, and these Companies continue to do business in the USA; especially with lucrative contracts from the US Government.
ReplyDeleteAs the Senator correctly states the fines are viewed as "a cost of doing business" and when a fine of $1.6B still results in $105B in revenues, as in the Siemens case, well you do the math...
And while doing business in the USA; these Violators invest in and buy US Companies, potentially propagating their corrupt business practices; case in point ABB's recent $58M DOJ/SEC Settlement and yesterdays announcement that ABB will buy Baldor Electric Co.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ABB-Set-to-Acquire-Baldor-for-zacks-1068836759.html?x=0
The Senator's initiative will probably send some peons and little people to jail, but I respectfully submit, that the real deterrent would come from "hitting the business in the pocketbook"; by stopping the awarding of US Government Contracts to the ABBs, BAEs, and Siemens of the World, as well as prohibiting investments in the USA and in US Companies for a period of time, based on the severity of the violations; especially those settled with NPAs and DPAs.