This Week in FCPA-Episode 80, The Last Jedi Edition
Bill on Bankruptcy: Supreme Court Cases Will Have Wide Impact
Wayward Financial Institutions Facing Increasingly Stricter Punishment
Grassley: HSBC Should Face Criminal Charges
The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has ruled that two UK retail banking advertisements, which made claims about the financial institution’s green credentials, were “misleading” and “omitted material information.”...more
The long political and prosecution standoff between the U.S. Government/Department of Justice and Huawei/China ended abruptly last week when Wanzhou Meng, CFO of Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. appeared in federal district...more
To our bad guys, 2019 was a year flush with hope and opportunity; it ended with recidivism, more misery from Venezuela, a charlatan, an Okie who pulled a multi-million dollar fast-one on Chesapeake and, as in years past, a...more
The U.S. and China have tentatively [maybe?] agreed that a first phase of a trade agreement “would roll back a portion of the tariffs placed on each other’s products, a significant step toward defusing tensions between the...more
Elon Musk and the SEC have reached an agreement to revise their earlier agreement to settle the latest round of issues caused by Musk’s Twitter habit. Under its terms, a Tesla securities attorney must now “preapprove any of...more
U.S. Financial Industry Developments - CFTC Proposes Rules to Simplify Process for Foreign Clearing Organizations to Obtain DCO Registration Exemption - On August 8, 2018, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)...more
Some analysis of Friday’s less-than-booming jobs report – NYTimes and Bloomberg And a look at Fed Chair Powell’s first major remarks on the state of the economy and the potential effects a trade war would have on the Fed’s...more
On Feb. 23, 2018, a couple of months after the first French DPA (“CJIP - convention judiciaire d’intérêt public”) in history was entered into between the French prosecutor office and HSBC Private Bank Suisse in relation to...more
A look at the big-time Wells Fargo/Fed settlement of last Friday night, which saw the Fed blasting the bank’s board for oversight failures, forcing Wells to replace a full fourth of its 16-member Board, and instituting a rare...more
On January 18, 2018, HSBC Holdings Plc (“HSBC”) entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Fraud Section (“DOJ”) pursuant to which it will pay $101.5 million in criminal...more
On November 30, 2017, the Institut des Hautes Etudes sur la Justice (IHEJ) and Skadden hosted a roundtable at the Cercle de l’Union Interalliée in Paris to discuss new perspectives on the Sapin II Act and cross-border...more
Jay and I return for a wide-ranging discussion on some of the top compliance- and ethics-related stories of the week, including: 1. There are several FCPA 40th anniversary pieces going up these days. The FCPA Blog is looking...more
While I am not sure how much celebrating HSBC might be doing this week, they should have pride in making it through the five-year DPA. The bank worked very hard to overcome its miss-steps and hopefully it will continue to do...more
HSBC announced yesterday that, 5 years after its controversial deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ following the Swiss bank’s 2012 $1.9 billion payment over money-laundering allegations, it’ll be released from those...more
In a move that could signal a new phase of government enforcement in France, on November 27, 2017, French authorities published a Convention judiciaire d’intérêt public (CJIP) with HSBC Private Bank Suisse SA (HSBC PB), the...more
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the addition of a new Department of Justice (DOJ) Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) policy, titled the FCPA Corporate Enforcement Policy. The new policy, which was...more
On July 12, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued an important decision regarding the role of federal courts in cases resolved through deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) — a settlement avenue that the...more
On June 30, 2017, the SEC and the U.S. Attorney brought parallel civil and criminal fraud charges against Renwick Haddow, the owner of an unregistered broker-dealer entity named InCrowd Equity Inc., and two corporate entities...more
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation—the company that “serves as the back end for much Wall Street trading”—has announced a big step forward in the embrace of blockchain technology to track and report transactions. IBM...more
There was once a man named Gulliver who traveled widely and wrote a book about his adventures called Gulliver’s Tales. During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a...more
I am at the end of my week of Marx Brothers themed posts. As you can tell, I am a huge fan and several of you have asked which is my favorite film. Before answering I must confess that I much prefer their Paramount films to...more
CFTC Issues CME Group Report Card: Scores Generally Good But NYMEX and COMEX Directed to Continue to Enhance Spoofing Surveillance - The Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group found early presents under its Christmas tree...more
A Swiss unit of U.K. financial services giant HSBC Holdings plc. settled charges that the firm repeatedly sold securities and rendered advisory services in the U.S. without registering with the Commission despite legal advice...more
The goal of any company regarding its compliance regime should be to make compliance a part of the fabric of your company and the face that you present to the world. That was the message from the interview conducted by Adam...more
We have all watched the familiar scene on Capitol Hill – the latest public scandal like officials from the Internal Revenue Service are dragged up to Capitol Hill to appear before a Committee, raise their right hands, take...more