At its April 7, 2010 meeting the United States Sentencing Commission approved amendments to its Sentencing Guidelines. The next day on April 8, 2010, the UK Bribery Bill received Royal Assent. These two events follow the December 9, 2009 release by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development’s (OECD) Recommendation for Further Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials, when the OECD marked the tenth anniversary of the entry into force of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.

These three releases, which comprise of two changes in the legal schemes by two of the world’s largest economic players and the proposal of one of the largest Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) dedicated to ending corruption across the globe portend significant changes in how companies will be structured and transact business going forward in the new decade. This is the third and final of three postings which have discussed the changes that companies, with any US or UK presence, will be required to implement. In the initial post we considered the changes to the US Sentencing Guidelines; we then discussed the changes required by the UK Bribery Bill; and in this third and final post in this series, we will end with the recommendations regarding facilitation payments as found in the OECD’s Recommendation for Further Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials.