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FCPA Compliance Report

Episode 442, Serco Graphix DPA

In this episode I visit with Sacha Harber-Kelly, a partner at Gibson Dunn in the UK and Steve Melrose, a senior Associate at the firm. They authored what I think is one of the best summaries of the recent Serco Graphic Deferred Prosecution Agreement and they came on the podcast to flesh out some of their thoughts on the matter. Highlights from the podcast include:
1.     What is the significance of this Serco DPA?
2.     What was the court’s analysis?
3.     Why did the court deem the DPA in the interest of justice?
4.     What did the court say about the seriousness of the conduct?
5.     What was the company’s cooperation and how did that play into the court’s analysis?
6.     What would have been the collateral consequences to the company had it been convicted at trial?
7.     How did the court view the strength of the evidence brought forward by the SFO?
8.     What was the court’s discussion around whether or not the terms of the DPA fair reasonable and proportionate?
9.     What is the significance of postponement of the Statement of Facts?
10.  Does the Serco Graphix DPA provide any additional guidance beyond prior DPAs issued in the UK?
For more information on Sacha Harber-Kelly, check out his LinkedIn profile here. For more information on Steve Melrose, check out his LinkedIn profile here. To read the full client alert, The SFO’s Fifth DPA – High Five or Down Low? Too Slow !click here.
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Daily Compliance News

August 25, 2019 Sunday Book Review edition

In today’s edition Sunday Book Review edition of Daily Compliance News:
· King of the World: The Life of Louis XIV-Phillip Mansel
· Legacy: One Family, A Cup of Tea and the Company that Took on the World-Thomas Harding
· Cold Warriors- Duncan White
· The Misquito-Timothy Windguard

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Daily Compliance News

August 24, 2019-get out of China edition

In today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:

  • Deutsche Bank spanked in FCPA enforcement action. (Bloomberg)
  • Carrefour business unit investigated . (Reuters.com)
  • Trump order US companies to ‘get out of China”. What could go wrong? (FT)
  • When “no win, no fee” really isn’t true. (WSJ)
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Daily Compliance News

August 23, 2019-you can’t make this stuff up edition

In today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:

  • More allegations against Huawei are released. (WSJ)
  • Venezuelan opposition leader gets to appoint CITGO Board. (Houston Chronicle)
  • Why does Buford have an in-house PI and why did he trade confidential documents for a sex tape? (FT)
  • You can’t make this stuff up. (NYT)
Categories
Adventures in Compliance

The Veiled Lodger and Empathy in Compliance

Over this week’s podcast series in Adventures in Compliance, I have used stories from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, mining each story for themes and lessons related to the compliance professional, leadership and business ethics. In today’s offering, I consider The Veiled Lodger. It is one of the shortest stories in this volume and one of the clearest which shows the influence Holmes can bring to bear on the participants in the tale. The final problem solved informs today’s discussion of empathy in compliance.
 Holmes is visited by Mrs. Merrilow, a landlady from South Brixton who has an unusual lodger who never shows her face as it has been hideously mutilated. This woman, Mrs. Ronder, carries a terrible secret but will not involve the clergy or the police and will only talk to Holmes.
Holmes and Watson travel to see Mrs. Ronder and she is wearing her veil. The mutilation was caused by a planned murder gone awry. She and her lover, Leonardo, used a circus lion to murder her husband and the lion then turned on her, severely disfiguring her. Mrs. Ronder could not bring herself to implicate Leonardo in her husband’s murder at the inquest and is only now telling this story because she believes that she will soon die. Ever since the night of the incident, she has lived alone and veiled. Holmes can only offer advice in this situation; realizing that Mrs. Ronder is contemplating suicide, he reminds her that her life is worth something as an example of patient suffering in an impatient world. She responds to this by lifting her veil, and the sight is ghastly. However (and this is where the empathy comes in) Holmes see a bottle of prussic acid on her mantle and tells her “Keep your hands off it.” A few days later,  Holmes receives a bottle of prussic acid from Mrs. Ronder. In considering what Holmes told her, she apparently thought better of it.
Compliance Takeaways
  1. Empathy is an important habit for any CCO or compliance practitioner to not only practice but also master.
  2. Engaging in empathy does not mean shying away from difficult conversations.
  3. Do you look for empathy in the hiring process?
  4. One way that empathy manifests itself is courtesy.
  5. People rarely think of courtesy and respect as leadership skills but if you can bring these to bear in your compliance practice, you can garner greater influence as not only someone who cares but someone who cares and gets things accomplished.
I hope you have enjoyed another Holmes themed week as mu
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This Week in FCPA

Episode 168 – the Chosen One edition

As Donald Trump announces he is the “Chosen One” and the Business Roundtable stuns the corporate community with a new Statement on the Purpose of Corporations, Tom and Jay are back  to discuss some of this week’s top compliance and ethics stories which caught their collective eyes.
1.    The Business Roundtable issues a new Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.
2.    Mike Volkov takes a deep dive into the CCPA.
3.    Is Amazon liable for Capital One hack?
4.    Is summer the right time to close FCPA cases?
5.    You know it’s bad with BVI lawyer calls out the ABA for opposing UBO regulation.
6.    Proactive assessments in health care ethics and compliance programs.
7.    Trial judge rejects Alstom defendant 5thand 6thAmendment claims to toss case.
8.    UK goes after funds obtained through bribery and corruption.
9.    Monitor appointed in MTS FCPA enforcement action.
10. Sherlock Holmes is back in another week of Adventures in Compliance podcasts on the Compliance Podcast Network. Check out the following: Monday-The Three Garridebs and Monitoring Controls; Tuesday-The Problem at Thor Bridge and Monitoring Controls; Wednesday-theCreeping Man and Risk Management by Your Board; Thursday-The Lion’s Mane and Risk-Based Monitoring; and Friday-the Veiled Lodger and Empathy in Compliance. The podcast is available on multiple sites: the FCPA Compliance Report, iTunes, JDSupra, Megaphone,YouTube,  Spotifyand Corporate Compliance Insights,  Compliance Podcast Networkand now on the C-Suite Radio Network.
11. Join Tom and Jay and a host of other great speakers and guest at Converge19 in Denver October 2 & 3. Listeners to this podcast can obtain a complimentary ticket by using the promotion code foxvip, for registration and information, click here.
Tom Fox is the Compliance Evangelist and can be reached at tfox@tfoxlaw.com. Jay Rosen is Mr. Monitor and can be reached at jrosen@affiliatedmonitors.com. For more information on how an independent monitor can help improve your company’s ethics and compliance program, visit our sponsor Affiliated Monitors at www.affiliatedmonitors.com.
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12 O’Clock High-a podcast on business leadership

Leadership Lessons from the Presidencies of Grover Cleveland

Richard Lummis and I are back to continue our series of exploring leadership through the study of US Presidents. This episode begins a short series on Gilded Age Presidents, now largely forgotten. In this episode we take up Grover Cleveland.Some of the highlights include:

  1. Educational and Professional background of Grover Cleveland
  2. New York Politician including his term as Mayor of Buffalo and Governor of NY
  1. Election Campaigns, including Rum, Romanism and Rebellion
  1. Presidency including Reform (1stterm); the Tariff (1stterm); Military Policy (1stterm); Labor unrest and Pullman Strike (2ndterm) and Foreign affairs (2ndterm)
  1. Leadership Issues including (1) Why tone at the top matters? A Public Office is a Public Trust; (2) How Cleveland helped to return power to the Executive Branch; (3) When is the ‘vision thing’ needed? and (6) Servant Leadership- Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters.
Categories
Adventures in Compliance

The Veiled Lodger and Empathy in Compliance

Over this week’s podcast series in Adventures in Compliance, I have used stories from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, mining each story for themes and lessons related to the compliance professional, leadership and business ethics. In today’s offering, I consider The Veiled Lodger. It is one of the shortest stories in this volume and one of the clearest which shows the influence Holmes can bring to bear on the participants in the tale. The final problem solved informs today’s discussion of empathy in compliance.
Holmes is visited by Mrs. Merrilow, a landlady from South Brixton who has an unusual lodger who never shows her face as it has been hideously mutilated. This woman, Mrs. Ronder, carries a terrible secret but will not involve the clergy or the police and will only talk to Holmes. Holmes and Watson travel to see Mrs. Ronder and she is wearing her veil. The mutilation was caused by a planned murder gone awry. She and her lover, Leonardo, used a circus lion to murder her husband and the lion then turned on her, severely disfiguring her. Mrs. Ronder could not bring herself to implicate Leonardo in her husband’s murder at the inquest and is only now telling this story because she believes that she will soon die. Ever since the night of the incident, she has lived alone and veiled. Holmes can only offer advice in this situation; realizing that Mrs. Ronder is contemplating suicide, he reminds her that her life is worth something as an example of patient suffering in an impatient world. She responds to this by lifting her veil, and the sight is ghastly. However (and this is where the empathy comes in) Holmes see a bottle of prussic acid on her mantle and tells her “Keep your hands off it.” A few days later,  Holmes receives a bottle of prussic acid from Mrs. Ronder. In considering what Holmes told her, she apparently thought better of it.
Compliance Takeaways

  1. Empathy is an important habit for any CCO or compliance practitioner to not only practice but also master.
  1. Engaging in empathy does not mean shying away from difficult conversations.
  1. Do you look for empathy in the hiring process?
  2. One way that empathy manifests itself is courtesy.
  3. People rarely think of courtesy and respect as leadership skills but if you can bring these to bear in your compliance practice, you can garner greater influence as not only someone who cares but someone who cares and gets things accomplished.

I hope you have enjoyed another Holmes themed week as much as I have enjoyed rereading the stories and bringing the compliance and leadership insights to you.

Categories
Adventures in Compliance

Adventures in Compliance: The Lion’s Mane and Risk-Based Monitoring

Welcome back to another episode of Adventures in Compliance. This week, we are considering stories from The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, mining each story for themes and lessons related to the compliance professional, leadership and business ethics. Today, we  The Lion’s Mane. This is one of two stories narrated by Holmes himself and not reported by Dr. Watson. The final problem solved informs today’s discussion that it is risk-based monitoring which allows a person (or company) to operate safely so that no injury occurs.
Yesterday, I considered The Creeping Man as an introduction to risk management and compliance at the very top of an organization. Today I want to discuss risk-based monitoring.
Compliance Takeaways
  1. What is Risk-based monitoring?It is really about continuous, ongoing monitoring for those things which provide the most potential future risk to you. By using risk-based monitoring to review issues on an ongoing basis, and the models that are behind the risk-based modeling, risk-based monitoring models, they’re continuously refined based on incoming data.
  2. Siloed Data.The problem for many companies is they are siloed in not only their data but also in the systems. Because of the disparity of data systems, many companies are not tracking rigorous, quantified information all the time. As data comes in you begin to note certain patterns, which might actually point towards a variety of red flags for more thorough investigation.
  3. See issues in real-time?Having access to information around sales, the sales process and corporate largess in areas from corporate social responsibility work, to gifts, travel and entertainment, to conferences for customers and end users. With such risked-based monitoring a compliance professional has the opportunity see trends developing which could allow an intervention for a prescriptive solution which could prevent an issue from becoming a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violation.
  4. Greater Profitability.Finally, the beauty of all these techniques is that they are tools that can make companies more efficient and, at the end of the day, more profitable. They also move compliance into the fabric and DNA of an organization or to use another well-worn phrase, operationalize compliance. The Department of Justice has made clear what it expects around the risk management process. You need to develop your response now.
Join us tomorrow as we mine the story of The Veiled Lodger for its compliance lessons.
Categories
Daily Compliance News

Daily Compliance News: August 22, 2019-the more whistleblowers fired edition

In today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:

  • Did Phillips fire whistleblower to get rid of him? (com)
  • Senator Warren wants Wells Fargo to explain fees charged on closed accounts. (NYT)
  • Trial court rejects Alstom employee attempt to have case dismissed. (WSJ)
  • Mickey is not happy about now. (MarketWatch)