FCPA

6 in criminal penalties and $10.3 million in forfeiture in the DOJ case and $65 million in civil penalties, $26 million in disgorgement, and $78 million in pre-judgment interest in the SEC case. In addition, the bank's U.K. subsidiary responsible for financing one of the bond offerings pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced to a criminal fine of $500,000. U.K. authorities further assessed a penalty of $201 million against the bank, of which the DOJ credited $24,752,000 against its overall penalty. The DOJ further credited $47,200,000 for payment to its enforcement counterpart, the SEC. All in, the bank will be responsible for paying U.K. and U.S. authorities $475,264,376 to resolve the bribery and fraud charges leveled against it. It also must pay $200 million in debt relief to Mozambique, which suffered significant financial distress as a result of its own officials' misconduct and the bank's alleged misconduct. Also dragged into the enforcement action was VTB Capital PLC, a London investment banking arm of a Russian holding company that allegedly participated in the Mozambican loan arrangements described in depth above, fully aware of the back door negotiations with Mozambican officials and the risky level of indebtedness the government had amassed at the two SOEs. The SEC issued a cease and desist order against VTB for fraudulent conduct, ordering the company to pay $2,000,000 in disgorgement and $429,883.94 in prejudgment interest for a total fine of $2,429,883.94. 1 For purposes of our statistics, the "average excluding outliers" refers to the pure average sanction, excluding any outliers as calculated using the Tukey Fences model, which utilizes interquartile ranges. UPSHOT At best, 2021 can be described as rather uneventful – particularly compared to a memorable 2020, in which companies faced over eight billion dollars in FCPA- related fines. The DOJ and SEC announced only four combined corporate enforcement actions in the year, fewer than during any year since 2002. With only four combined actions, which amount to a total of $659 million in penalties, the statistics we usually include in our Trends and Patterns publications are of limited use here. After all, averages and medium sanctions offer little insight with only four such actions. That said, the four data points suggest that the average corporate penalty (excluding outliers), which was $110 million in 2020 and $82.8 million in 2019, dropped somewhat in 2021 to $61 million. 1 Finally, as in the past several years, where certain portions of the aggregate corporate enforcement action sanctions were paid out to foreign governments, part of the AFW penalty will be paid to the governments of Brazil and the United Kingdom. Credit Suisse will also pay approximately $200 million to U.K. authorities and provide another approximately $200 million to Mozambique for debt relief for the transactions in question.

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