Legal News

FCPA Ending its ?Most Dynamic Single Year? With a Bang

By Dionne Searcey

Last month, we wrote a post on plans by DOJ brass to ramp up the the number of individuals targeted in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations. Such efforts, we wrote, could lead to the count flying off the charts by the end of the year.

Well, on Monday it did.

Two Florida executives of a Miami-Dade County-based telecommunications company, the president of Florida-based Telecom Consulting Services Corp., and two former Haitian government officials were charged in an indictment unsealed yesterday for their alleged roles in a foreign bribery, wire fraud and money laundering scheme, DOJ has announced. Click here for the indictment. Attorneys for the five could not be reached.

For about four years ending in 2005, according to the indictment, the telecom company paid more than $800,000 to shell companies to be used for bribes to foreign officials of Haiti’s state-owned phone company, Telecommunications D’Haiti. The bribes were intended to get a cut-rate deal on phone rates and were listed in company records as “commissions” or “consulting fees.”

DOJ’s headcount for indicted individuals is now at 19 for the year — more than for any previous year — and shows officials were serious when they said they would make examples out of executives who engage in overseas bribery schemes.

As of mid-November DOJ currently had 130 ongoing FCPA investigations. Lanny A. Breuer, Assistant Attorney General for DOJ’s criminal division (pictured), has called 2009 “the most dynamic single year in the more than 30 years since the FCPA was enacted.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 08, 2009 (boomark / email).