The Rise and Rise of FCPA
Lisa Lacy
March 24, 2011
Partner David Krakoff is quoted extensively in the article, "The Rise and Rise of FCPA" by Lisa Lacy. "The Rise and Rise of the FCPA" appears in the April issue of Corporate Secretary magazine and is posted online at Business Insider.
‘American and European businesses have moved aggressively to markets that are cost-effective,’ says David Krakoff, partner with law firm BuckleySandler, which has a government enforcement white-collar practice. ‘It’s an opportunity to build the same goods at a cheaper price, but those countries – India, China, Central and South America, and Africa – have different business traditions.’
There are also many more anti-corruption regulations on the books, drawing more attention to the issue. The UK enacted its Bribery Act in 2010 to ‘respond more effectively to bribery at home or abroad,’ according to the Ministry of Justice. There’s also the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which encourages whistleblowers to come forward; the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Convention on Combating Bribery, which, like the FCPA, establishes legally binding standards to criminalize bribery of foreign public officials; and, to a degree, Sarbanes-Oxley, which was enacted in 2002 as a reaction to corporate accounting scandals. ‘In corporate America, we started to see a lot of voluntary disclosures around 2001 in an effort to prevent another Enron,’ Krakoff recalls.