Will The Sapin II Anti-Corruption Law Shepherd France Into A New Era Of Transparency?
Will The Sapin II Anti-Corruption Law Shepherd France Into A New Era Of Transparency?
By Maria Knapp - DEC 14, 2016 @ 11:11 AM
LONDON—The French national assembly has finally voted on the final text of its new anti-corruption law, which joins the ranks of 20 national anticorruption laws globally. The law is intended as a civil, preventive instrument and has a positive obligation on companies at its core. It does not significantly interfere with existing laws and sentencing guidelines on corruption and “traffic d’influence,” and it doesn’t require a predicate offense to kick in. In short, it looks and feels different from its UK and American counterparts in subtle but important ways.
Michel Sapin, currently the minister of finance, originally promoted a bill in the early 1990s (labeled “Sapin I”) that introduced measures curtailing lobbying. Sapin II was two years in the making and went through substantial back-and-forth amendments along the way. Now that the dust has settled, a few things are clear:
Sapin II expands extra-territorial reach for French prosecutors. The law applies fully to corruption by French companies overseas and foreign companies with a footprint in France (“exercising all or some of its activities on French territory”), and its prosecutors may have authority to investigate acts whether or not an offense occurred under local law.
It establishes a strict positive obligation on French companies to “prevent corruption.” Companies with over 500 employees or an annual turnover in excess of EUR 100m are expected to implement an appropriate internal ABC risk management framework against which the company and its directors will be held accountable by the newly created Agence Française Anticorruption (AFA, see below). This is different from section 7 of the UK Bribery Act, which is in effect a compliance defense for an act of bribery. Under Sapin II, a company may be sanctioned for non-compliance without any predicate offense. Moreover, there is a stick but no carrot: there is no formal mechanism for prevention programs to reduce the severity of penalties for companies prosecuted for corruption...
