On December 1, 2011, United States District Judge A. Howard Matz threw out the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) bribery convictions against Lindsey Manufacturing, an emergency electricity tower construction company, its president Keith Lindsey, and vice-president and chief financial officer Steve Lee, on the basis of repeated prosecutorial misconduct. In dismissing the indictment with prejudice, Judge Matz described the government’s investigation as “sloppy, incomplete and notably overzealous.” Last May, a jury had convicted the company, Lindsey, and Lee for bribing foreign officials at the Mexican state-owned utility Comisión Federal de Electricidad (“CFE”). In particular, the jury agreed that Lindsey Manufacturing had hired Grupo International (“Grupo”), a Mexican company owned and controlled by co-defendants Enrique and Angela Aguilar, in 2002 and paid a Grupo sales representative a 30 percent commission that was then used to bribe government officials at CFE to win contracts for Lindsey Manufacturing. The government had alleged that the defendant executives had knowledge of this scheme, which resulted in the payment of bribes totaling more than $5 million. The individual defendants faced up to 30 years in prison.

The conviction of Lindsey Manufacturing was particularly noteworthy because it represented the first time a company had been tried and convicted under the FCPA. Following the conviction, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer touted the prosecution as an “important milestone in our FCPA enforcement efforts” and warned that it would not be the last prosecution of a company under the FCPA.