PLEA-bargaining? Just not British, old boy.
The Serious Fraud Office has revealed there has been a distinctly lukewarm response by British business to a suggestion that they ‘fess up to bribery in order to get more lenient treatment.
Among those who had championed the idea of importing a practice well-established in the United States has been Treasury Select Committee chairman, John McFall MP.
But the SFO says since the idea was mooted by it a year ago only “three or four” companies had come forward to turn themselves in for wrongdoing as part of a plea bargain.
Keith McCarthy, head of anti-corruption at the SFO, says: “Those cases are perhaps not as many as Richard (Alderman, director of the SFO) and I had anticipated might happen.”
In stark contrast, it has been estimated that almost two out of three of the 68 US corporate foreign corruption cases that were unearthed between 2005 and 2007 were due to such horse-trading on guilt-and-pu
nishment with the American authorities.
Not for the first time, it looks like the tortuous tentacle of Brussels has a lot to do with this stark transatlantic contrast.
European Union rules prohibit companies that have been found guilty of paying backhanders to win overseas contracts from future public contracts.
This is thought to be the most likely cause of British businesses deciding discretion is the better part of valour (and self-interest) in not confessing their misdemeanours.
The trade-off of what they gain and what they lose is not worth it. Which company, particularly in these stretched economic times, would voluntarily rule themselves out of EU procurement contracts to clear the slate on previous illicit practice?
Given Britain’s lamentable record of securing convictions on wrongdoing in the financial sector and elsewhere (from big defence contracts to insider trading), I’m in the camp of realpolitikas far as plea-bargaining is concerned.
Better not to be white-than-white in dealings with the miscreants if it means Britain can notch up a far better performance for bringing errant corporates to justice.
Plea-bargaining would also have the effect of creating a better culture of discouraging business backhanders and the like in the first place.
People could not know that one of their colleagues in the intimate crooked circle might rat on them at a given juncture.
Brussels is Brussels, though. And regulations are regulations. The word doctrinaire does originally come from France, after all.
