Legal News

Mendelsohn, Former Government FCPA Guru, Looks Forward

By Dionne Searcey

As the former deputy chief of the fraud section of the Justice Department, Mark Mendelsohn was the guru of all things FCPA.

In private practice now as a partner at Paul Weiss, Mendelsohn is likely still the person corporate counsel most want to tape record sleep talking.

The FCPA, which outlaws the overseas bribery of public officials, is a gray law, and the DOJ's decisions on whom to prosecute are a bit of a mystery.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mendelsohn shared his views on how the Justice Department’s application of the FCPA will play out under new leadership and his predictions for how an increasingly global fight against corruption will be waged.

You can read the interview here, in which Mendelsohn addresses the focused attention on foreign corruption in recent years, the expected effect of the Dodd-Frank law on the government’s anticorruption efforts, and the U.K.’s new Bribery Act.

Below is some bonus coverage from the cutting room floor:

On why anti-corruption movements have been gaining steam across the globe:

The connection and relationship between the corruption problem and other social ills is really what's at the heart of this. I think the corporate social responsibility movement, the pro-environmental movement, the human rights movement all have something to do with the anti-corruption movement.

On resource issues the SEC faces in handling tips from the Dodd-Frank whistleblower provision:

One thing they have going for them is the people who work in this area as I once did on the government side have experience in evaluating these cases. They're pretty well equipped to identify leads that are solid and to prioritize and put them ahead of other ones that while are interesting may have no leads that are solid to pursue. Given that they have scarce resources, they have good people, which obviously helps.

On the legal exposure faced by hedge funds and private equity firms that are under new FCPA scrutiny:

The harder cases are where you have financial institution clients making an investment in an emerging market. The major emerging markets in China, Brazil, Russia, India are especially where the business community is seeing growth opportunities, and they may make these minority investments where you're not in control and you can't dictate what's going to happen. . . . That's really difficult. It's easier when you're in charge.

On future tactics that could be employed in FCPA prosecutions:

[You might see more] traditional law enforcement techniques, sting operations – provided at the end of the day there is a successful outcome from the government's perspective. On-going use of techniques like wiretaps, which are obviously very labor intensive and costly but can be very effective. You will see selective use of those, you won't see wire taps being used willy-nilly.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 17, 2011 (boomark / email).