A continuing quirk of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is the ability to ask the Department of Justice whether a particular set of facts would be a violation of the Act. Given all of the recent FCPA activity I expected there to be an uptick in Opinion Procedure Releases under the FCPA. So far that does not seem to be the case. There was one release in 2009 and only the second for 2010 has recently been issued.
Maybe the bribery situations being faced by corporate America are straightforward and don’t need interpretation (or unwanted attention) from the Department of Justice.
The Opinion Requestor runs a micro-finance operation in a country in Eurasia. (I’m not sure why they used this identification.) They are trying to convert from a non-profit model to a commercial operation. The government of the unnamed Eurasian country is insisting that the requestor make a significant grant to local micro-finance institution. The regulating agency has provided a short list of six local MFIs in the Eurasian country. Either cough of the cash to get it localized or it can’t get its operating permits.
Of the six local micro-finance institutions, they found three “as generally unqualified to receive the grant funds and put them to effective use.” They then conducted further diligence on the remaining three and ruled out two more: one for conflict of interest concerns, the other after the discovery of a previously undisclosed ownership change in the entity.
That left them with one choice, so they dove deeper in their diligence. They discovered that one of the board members of the local micro-finance institution was also a government official.
The requestor laid out a series of controls is would put in place to protect the investment in the local micro-finance institution from corrupt influence and prevent money from flowing to board members.
There is some interesting discussion about what charitable institutions need to look at and controls needed to avoid FCPA violations. The DOJ also refers to three prior releases that have dealt with charitable-type grants or donations:
- FCPA Opinion Release 95-01 (Jan. 11, 1995)
- FCPA Opinion Release 97-02 (Nov. 5, 1997)
- FCPA Opinion Release 06-01 (Oct. 16, 2006)
The situation in the release is unique but you can use the controls and discussion in the release to help with your own FCPA compliance program.
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