Wanted: Doggie Compliance Monitor

animal

This could be the dream job for compliance professionals who love animals! An animal breeding business in Virginia is paying $35 million to settle charges that it mistreated thousands of beagles in its care, and must hire a compliance monitor to oversee its improved animal welfare compliance program.  The company in question is Envigo RSM,…

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Ericsson Exits Monitorship

ericsson

Mobile phone giant Ericsson has wrapped up work with its independent compliance monitor, formally concluding one of the biggest and longest FCPA enforcement actions ever.  Ericsson announced the end of the monitorship Monday morning. That monitor, Andreas Pohlmann, was originally appointed in 2020 several months after Ericsson settled its FCPA violations in December 2019. The…

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SAP’s Non-Monitor Monitorship

SAP

Here’s a rather odd item in the annals of FCPA enforcement: software giant SAP recently assigned one of its internal compliance employees to be the company’s “monitorship compliance officer” — for an FCPA settlement announced in January that didn’t require a compliance monitor. This came to my attention when the SAP employee announced on LinkedIn…

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Another FCPA Action With No Monitor

fcpa

Another week, another FCPA enforcement action against a Swiss commodities trader — and one that again might leave compliance officers puzzled, since it involves a repeat corporate offender that didn’t self-disclose, yet still managed to walk away without a compliance monitor. The company in question is Trafigura, which last week pleaded guilty to charges that…

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Gunvor, Part II: Monitor Questions

gunvor

Today let’s return to that mammoth FCPA settlement the other week against Swiss trading giant Gunvor, because one detail about the case seems quite puzzling. How does a recidivist offender with egregious FCPA violations avoid a compliance monitor? We didn’t get to explore that issue in our original post about Gunvor, but I’ve been reading…

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A Tale of Two Monitor Decisions

monitor

One dreaded outcome from a regulatory investigation is the appointment of an independent compliance monitor. Now two recent corporate misconduct settlements demonstrate how puzzling regulators’ decisions about compliance monitors can be — because for the life of me, I can’t figure out why one company received a monitor while the other didn’t. The cases involve…

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JP Morgan, Part II: The Consultant Agreement

JPMorgan

Today I want to revisit that enforcement action against JP Morgan from last week, because there’s more here that compliance officers need to consider. We need to talk about the compliance consultant JP Morgan has to hire as part of its settlement. In our first post about this scandal last Friday, we looked at the…

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The Swiss Angle in Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse

I want to circle back to that FCPA enforcement action against Credit Suisse a final time, because we have one more detail of this case that hasn’t yet been discussed much. We haven’t talked about the restrictions that Swiss regulators have imposed on Credit Suisse’s future business activities. To recap, last month Credit Suisse settled…

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A Note on DOJ Monitorships

monitor

Some gossip for compliance professionals who like to obsess about corporate compliance monitors: the Fraud Section at the Justice Department has started publishing the names of monitors assigned to corporate corruption cases.  It looks like the names appeared on the Fraud Section website last week, and so far there are only 13 monitorships listed. Still,…

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