The London lawyer accused by the U.S. of being a middleman in KBR's bribery of Nigerian officials appeared in court last week to fight extradition. Jeffrey Tesler, 61, a U.K. citizen, was indicted in February by a federal grand jury in Houston. He was charged with one count of conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and ten substantive FCPA offenses. If convicted on all counts, he faces up to 55 years in prison. U.K. police, acting at the request of U.S. authorities, arrested Tesler in March. . . .

Read the entire post at The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

Tesler Fights Extradition; Jefferson Appeals

The lawsuit examining how three African rulers and their families managed to acquire dozens of luxury homes, cars and other assets in France has been stopped. A Paris magistrate had ordered the investigation in May at the request of Transparency International. See our post here. But last month an appellate court agreed with the Justice Ministry that TI lacked standing to bring the case. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

Paris Punts On Probe

Virginia-based DynCorp International said payments by its subcontractors to speed up visas and permits may have caused the company to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. In its November 12, 2009 quarterly report (Form 10-Q), it said it found about $300,000 in payments by subcontractors to "expedite the issuance of a limited number of visas and licenses from foreign government agencies." The company didn't include any details about the project involved or the subcontractors referred to in the disclosure. It said it had self-reported the payments to the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission a week earlier and hired outside counsel to conduct an investigation. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog  www.fcpablog.com

Dyncorp Reports Payments, Removes Compliance Officer

Ready or not, the cyberworld is forcing accountability onto real-world institutions and leaders. E-government initiatives, public and private whistleblower sites, YouTube, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, free-press groups and more -- they're giving ordinary citizens a place to sound off, be heard, and band together. Transparency International has said about the interactive side of the web: . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog  www.fcpablog.com

Web 2.0 v. Corruption

You wouldn't expect a country with 240 million people and 17,000 islands strung along the equator from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean to be neat and orderly. Still, the public death match between Indonesia's national police and its popular Corruption Eradication Commission known as the KPK is particularly messy, even by local standards. That's because there's so much at stake. Corruption has long been Indonesia's biggest problem. And after plenty of broken promises from post-Suharto leaders, ordinary citizens had given up hoping for reform. Until the KPK came along. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog  www.fcpablog.com

Java's Giant Mess

If you haven't seen (or heard) last week's episode of Bill Moyers' Journal on PBS called LBJ's Path To War, it's something special. The hour-long program consists almost entirely of excerpts from President Johnson's recorded phone calls with advisors and congressional leaders. He's talking to them about the Vietnam problem. The program covers the period from November 1963, when Johnson took office after JFK's assassination and there were about 15,000 U.S. advisors on the ground in South Vietnam, until the end of 1965, when the build-up had reached 184,000 combat forces and there was no end in sight. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog  www.fcpablog.com

"We've got to conduct ourselves like men"

Surprising news from the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia. William Jefferson is free pending appeal of his conviction in August on 11 corruption counts. Last week U.S. District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III sentenced him to 13 years in prison. But the judged ruled on Wednesday that Jefferson can remain free during his appeal, which will likely take at least a year. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

Jefferson And Bourke Are Released On Bail

Mergers and acquisitions are back. Seeking Alpha just said: "Over the past few weeks, there has been a resurgence in acquisition activity, fueling an already strong market rally. This news has spanned all regions of the economy ranging from the transportation sector (Burlington Northern being taken over by Berkshire Hathaway) to pharmaceuticals (Schering Plough being acquired by Merck). Most recently, in the consumer sector, Kraft announced its intention to take over confectionery giant Cadbury while Hewlett Packard announced plans to buy 3com." . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

M&A Surge Means More FCPA Action

A Virginia man pleaded guilty on Friday, November 13th to being part of an overseas bribery conspiracy that began in 1996 and ended in 2003. Charles Paul Edward Jumet, 53, was charged in federal court in Richmond, Virginia under a two-count criminal information. He admitted conspiring with others to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by making corrupt payments to government officials in Panama and giving a false statement to the FBI about how he paid some of the bribe money. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

Guilty Plea In (Old) Panama Bribes Case

Former nine-term congressman William Jefferson, 63, was sentenced on Friday to 13 years in prison. He was found guilty on 11 of 16 corruption charges, including one count of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. He was acquitted of the single substantive FCPA charge he faced. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog  www.fcpablog.com

Jefferson Sentenced To 13 Years

News And Views About The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act And More

Let's talk about Mr. Bourke. He was sentenced Tuesday to a year and a day in jail and fined a million dollars for conspiring to violate the FCPA and lying to FBI agents. People in the courtroom said when he was convicted, Bourke was shocked. So apparently he never expected the jury to find him guilty. But when he was sentenced, he was happy and relieved. So he must have been expecting a lot worse. And that probably means the DOJ never offered him a deal with so little jail time. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

Frederic Bourke's Big Bet

The New York Times alleged yesterday that executives at the private military security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that might have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The payments were "intended to silence [the officials'] criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad," the Times said. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog  www.fcpablog.com

Blackwater And The FCPA

Frederic Bourke, the American entrepreneur who led a charmed life and whose prosecution brought new prominence to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison and fined $1 million for investing in a bribe-tainted deal in Azerbaijan and then lying to FBI agents about it. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

Bourke Gets A Year In Prison

Toss

Before getting to William Jefferson, this reminder: Frederic Bourke is scheduled to be sentenced in Manhattan today (Tuesday, November 10) at 2:30 pm. He could be jailed for up to ten years for conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and lying to federal investigators.

Now Jefferson: He'll learn his sentence this Friday in Alexandria, Virginia. Prosecutors want him jailed for 27 to 33 years. And once again there's a question whether the jury found Jefferson guilty of any FCPA-related offense. This time the answer could influence how long he'll spend behind bars. Here's the issue. . . .

Toss Jefferson's FCPA Conspiracy Count

Last week, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Michael Ranneberger, made a very strange announcement. He confirmed on his Twitter page that the U.S. government had denied a visa to Kenya's attorney general Amos Wako. What's strange is that as far as we know, it's the first time an American official has ever revealed a visa determination under Presidential Proclamation 7750. That's the executive order giving the State Department the power to exclude foreign kleptocrats, their families and friends. Before now, those decisions had always been made -- and kept -- in complete secrecy. . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

A Tweet Too Far?

In the western China municipality of Chongqing, a special deployment of 25,000 police officers was called in to fight organized crime. Chongqing city proper has around five million people but the region-- called the "municipality" -- has closer to 32 million (California's population is about 36 million). Last month, police said they had so far detained 4,893 suspected gangsters and formally arrested about 1,500. Among the 30 or so municipal officials being held are a former deputy police commissioner and the head of the justice bureau, Wen Qiang. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog  www.fcpablog.com

Gotham City East And West

Elizabeth Spahn, a professor at the New England School of Law, stopped by this week. She left a comment about Andy Spalding's latest post. In it, she cited her recent article that asks the questions: Why is there so little legal scholarship regarding international bribery? Why aren't law professors training their students on the issue? Why, she asks, don’t legal educators want to talk about international anti-corruption initiatives? . . .

Read the entire post at The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

The FCPA's Imperialist Myth

With so much to lose by going to trial, how many organizations and people will plead guilty to white collar crimes they didn't commit? Ellen Podgor of Stetson University College of Law and the White Collar Crime Prof Blog asks that question in her latest essay, "White Collar Innocence: Irrelevant in the High Stakes Risk Game." She looks at three defendants who claimed their innocence at trial but were convicted -- Arthur Andersen LLP, Jamie Olis, and Jeffrey Skilling. And three who pleaded guilty and avoided trials -- KPMG, Gene Foster, and Andrew Fastow. The second group, she says, enjoyed reduced sentences and finite results. . . .

Read the entire post on The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

Professor Podgor Pops The Question

On the subject of Frederic Bourke -- the wealthy entrepreneur convicted in July of conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and lying to FBI agents -- we now know what issues his lawyers plan to raise on appeal. Most relate to what Bourke knew and intended -- his mens rea. In a recent pleading arguing for his release pending the appeal, his lawyers said: . . .

Read the entire post at The FCPA Blog   www.fcpablog.com

How Appealing Are Bourke's Chances?

The first time we heard from Andy Spalding, a lawyer on a year-long Fulbright Research Grant in Mumbai, India, he floored us with the idea that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act causes corruption and hurts poor people. We just heard from him again, this time about the way the Justice Department explains the purpose of the FCPA and approaches enforcement. We'll let Andy speak for himself (because he does it so well). Here's what he said: . . .

The FCPA's Thwarted Intent

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