Feb
2011
Bribery Act for Natural Resource Companies – Reputational Risk
This week I attended a seminar regarding the Bribery Act, which featured a panel including Richard Alderman of the Serious Fraud Office, some lawyers and a corporate investigator. The room was filled with other lawyers and quite a few large corporates keen to know what the impact of this gold-plated British version of the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act might be for their business and their clients.
There has been a lot of speculation in the media about the impact of this legislation and perhaps some scaremongering, but for organisations in the oil, gas and mining sectors the risks are clear. These are industries that as a matter of routine work in far flung parts of the world that have very different standards of governance and transparency to what they are accustomed to in say the UK. Of course the act will only apply to organisations with interests in the UK, but given that London’s capital markets have been popular for a long time with natural resource companies, we can expect this to impact a significant portion of the industry.
There is an absolute defence available for firms that can demonstrate ‘adequate procedures’ and although what constitutes adequate has not yet been defined by the Ministry of Justice or the Serious Fraud Office, I suspect that many larger firms in the energy and mining sector will already have the ‘”gold standard” of procedures that Mr Alderman referenced frequently during the discussion.
That said there are other reasons that the impact of the Bribery Act should be of concern to businesses. Perhaps most significantly because we are currently experiencing a boom in merger and acquisition activity. It is important to note that the act will not apply retrospectively, but the glut of deals that we have seen so far since the start of the year are unlikely to end anytime soon and one wonders if the organisations buying assets in the UK fully comprehend the liabilities for their other operations that they are acquiring with the asset as a result of the Act.
The other aspect worth bearing in mind for businesses as a whole, but the natural resource industries especially, is the use of agents and the extent of liability for joint venture operations. Joint ventures are a regular feature of the natural resource landscape and very often firms based in the UK will use them as a means to enter a market where foreign stakes are limited. I’m not sure what the extent of the risk of liability is for these corporate structures, but am going to ask the question at the next seminar I attend on this subject.
Of course it is also worth noting that the SFO has been handed a paltry sum of only £2m for enforcement and the likely cost of a trial, if it comes to it, will put the prosecution rate fairly low, but as any organisation prosecuted under FCPA will tell you, reputations are expensive things to lose and the SFO is not shy of pursuing trophy prosecutions, especially when Mr Alderman moves on and his successor is looking to make a name for him/herself.
This will be an interesting one to watch as the guidance is published and the Act comes into force.
