Tina Søreide, Abiola Makinwa (2018)
Author: Abiola Makinwa and Tina Søreide (eds.).
In the 40 years since the historic passage of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, there has been a revolution in the world of anti-corruption enforcement. Foreign bribery is now is a criminal offence in most countries. Corporations are prohibited from engaging in the grand scale corruption that corrodes social, economic and political development. However, the challenge that still strongly persists is how to achieve effective enforcement of international and domestic foreign bribery rules.
It is perhaps not surprising that while the OECD in its 2014 report, An Analysis of the Crime of Bribery of Foreign Public Officials, notes that there has been a ‘drastic increase’ in the enforcement of anti-foreign bribery laws since 1999, this increase has taken place primarily outside the traditional criminal trial process.
In light of these developments, the IBA Anti-Corruption Committee set up the Structured Criminal Settlement Subcommittee (SCSS) to explore this growing enforcement trend. The activities of the SCSS is to explore the latest trends in national and global settlements of corruption cases; to review research and experience to identify key challenges in relation to the possibility of a global coordinated settlement framework; drawing on this research and experience, to propose a framework for the development of a coordinated criminal settlement policy for serious financial crime; and, to prepare reports or publications for members of the Committee and IBA members to be presented at forthcoming IBA conferences with a view to formulating a model framework for the settlement of serious financial criminal cases.
In this spirit, the SCSS embarked on its inaugural two-year project entitled, ‘Towards Global Standards in Structured Criminal Settlements for Corruption Offences’ (the ‘IBA SCSS study’). With the help of lawyers from 66 countries, the SCSS Committee has mapped the state-of-play of structured settlement regimes in Africa, the Far East, the Middle East, North and South America, and Western and Eastern Europe. The reports collated in this volume were based on a distributed questionnaire. These reports provide an up-to-date and comparative overview of salient issues relating to structured settlements for corruption offences from diverse national viewpoints.