Corporate Crime

Bipartisan Corporate Crime Fighting by the States

A new report from the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First on lawsuits filed by state attorneys general shows that the current cases against the drug companies and the tech sector are part of a long-standing practice of bipartisan cooperation in fighting corporate misconduct.

The report focuses on 644 cases in which AGs from multiple states took on companies over issues ranging from mortgage abuses to illicit marketing of prescription drugs and collected more than $100 billion in settlements over the past two decades.

These multistate cases are a subset of more than 7,000 state AG actions compiled for the latest expansion of Violation Tracker and now available for searching on the database.

In at least 260 multistate cases, a majority of the states signed on as plaintiffs. In 172 of the cases, 40 or more states participated. State AGs are split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans, meaning that the cases with large numbers of state participants are necessarily bipartisan.

In 362 of the cases, the defendants were giant companies included in the Fortune 500 or the Fortune Global 500. The parent company with the most cumulative multistate AG penalties is, by far, Bank of America, with more than $26 billion in settlements over issues such as mortgage abuses and the sale of toxic securities. It is followed by the Swiss bank UBS ($11 billion), Citigroup ($8 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($6 billion) and BP ($4.9 billion).

The most frequent defendant has been CVS Health, which has paid out more than $215 million in 14 settlements, most of them involving the alleged submission of false claims to state Medicaid programs and the payment of illicit kickbacks to healthcare providers. Another 47 parent companies have been involved in three or more multistate AG cases.

In 118 multistate AG cases, corporations have paid penalties of $100 million or more; in 19 of these the amount exceeded $1 billion. The biggest individual settlement was an agreement by UBS to repurchase $11 billion in investments known as auction-rate securities whose safety it allegedly misrepresented to investors. The second largest was an $8.7 billion agreement by Bank of America to resolve claims relating to predatory home mortgage practices by its Countrywide Financial subsidiary. (The recently announced multistate settlement with Purdue Pharma is not included because it is still tentative.)

Banks and other financial services companies account for far and away the largest monetary share of penalties paid in multistate AG cases — $70 billion from 122 settlements involving 65 different parent companies. In second place is the pharmaceutical industry with $10.4 billion in penalties from 137 settlements.

Consumer protection and price-fixing cases are the most numerous kinds of multistate AG lawsuits, but investor protection and mortgage abuse lawsuits against the big banks have generated the greatest monetary penalties.

In 243 of the multistate cases, the U.S. Department of Justice or another federal agency was also involved in the settlement and often led the negotiations. These actions, which accounted for $31 billion of the $105 billion in total penalties, include cases in which the federal entity, usually DOJ, initiated the investigation and brought in the states — as well as ones in which federal and state prosecutors were involved from the start.

Multistate AG lawsuits originated in the 1980s, when state prosecutors grew concerned at rollbacks in federal enforcement by the Reagan Administration and decided they needed to fill the gap. They scored a big win with the master tobacco settlement of the late 1990s and continued their actions through both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations.

There is every reason to believe that the number of multistate AG settlements will continue to grow. The pending cases against opioid and generic drug producers, as well as emerging antitrust investigations of the tech sector, could add billions more to the penalty totals.

Crossing Party Lines to Fight Corporate Crime

The state attorneys general seem to be divided on how big a settlement they should extract from the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma to resolve a lawsuit concerning their involvement in the opioid crisis. According to one report, the split is largely on party lines, with Democratic AGs calling for a bigger payout and Republican prosecutors settling for less.

More on the diverging negotiating positions will probably come to light in the days ahead. This disagreement should not, however, obscure the bigger story: states with very different partisan orientations have been cooperating for years on cases involving corporate misconduct.

On policy issues, state AGs exhibit strong ideological tendencies. Democratic AGs have been suing the Trump Administration repeatedly over issues such as the travel ban and migrant family separation. In the same way, Republican AGs went to court to try to undermine Obama Administration initiatives such as the Affordable Care Act.

Yet in the area of corporate crime-fighting, bipartisanship is the norm.

My colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First have been documenting this fact in the course of collecting data for the latest expansion of our Violation Tracker database. We’ve compiled more than 600 cases in which two or more state AGs successfully sued a corporation and collected monetary penalties, usually in the form of a settlement in which the company did not admit guilt.

Next week we will post the data on Violation Tracker and publish a report that analyzes the multistate AG cases. I can’t give away the main findings until then, but I can say that the new entries will make a major addition to penalty totals in the database.

Currently, there are 61 parent companies with $1 billion or more in cumulative penalties (our entries go back to the beginning of 2000). With the AG cases, that number increases to 84.

The penalty totals for many of the individual corporations, especially the big banks, will rise dramatically. The combined state and federal penalty total for Bank of America, for instance, will be in excess of $80 billion.

Although the report will focus mainly on the multistate AG cases, we also collected data on 7,000 single-state AG cases from across the country that will be added to Violation Tracker. These include lots of relatively minor consumer protection cases (crooked used car dealers and the like), but there are also plenty of major settlements, including 70 cases with corporate payouts of $100 million or more.

There have been a few state AGs who have shown less enthusiasm about pursuing corporate miscreants. One example was Scott Pruitt, when he held that post in Oklahoma before being chosen as the Trump Administration’s first administrator of the EPA.

As state AG, Pruitt brought few actions against companies on his own and did not sign on to many of the multistate cases. Fortunately, he was far from typical, even among the reddest states.

Facebook Joins the Multi-Billion-Dollar Penalty Club

It is a sign of how jaded we have become to corporate misconduct that the $5 billion fine imposed on Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission for privacy violations is being shrugged off by the company, by the market and by the public. Many are describing it as a slap on the wrist.

It’s true that a ten-figure penalty is no longer such a rarity. According to Violation Tracker, 35 parent companies have had to pay that amount in at least one case in the United States. Eleven corporations have been hit with billion-dollar-plus penalties more than once. Of these, nine are big banks: Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland and Wells Fargo. The other two are BP and Volkswagen.

Bank of America, whose penalty total is far greater than that of any other corporation, has racked up seven ten-figure cases, including three in excess of $10 billion.

BofA’s rap sheet is perhaps the most persuasive evidence that escalating penalties are not having the desired effect of deterring corporate wrongdoing. Even at the higher levels, the fines are seen by large companies as a tolerable cost to pay for continuing to do business more or less as before.

The Justice Department and the regulatory agencies seem to be aware of this and are at least making noises about taking other steps to deter and punish miscreants.

In the case of Facebook that includes provisions in the FTC settlement that will put more responsibility on the company’s board to make sure that privacy protections are enforced. It also enhances external oversight by an independent third-party monitor.

All of this might be more impressive if Facebook had not already signed a previous settlement with the FTC in 2012 that was supposed to establish strong privacy protections—provisions that the company has clearly evaded.

Also contained in the Facebook settlement is a provision that will require Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to personally certify that the company is adhering to privacy protections. This would only have an impact if it is rigorously enforced, with non-compliance putting him behind bars rather than just triggering another big payout.

There is also renewed discussion of stepped up antitrust enforcement, especially against the big tech companies. This would be more effective if federal authorities were willing to try breaking up the likes of Facebook, Alphabet/Google and Amazon rather than seeking limited restrictions on their market power. That approach has largely been shunned for the past two decades, ever since the effort to split up Microsoft collapsed and the DOJ had to settle for more modest remedies.

Prosecutors and policymakers continue to struggle with the issue of how to deal with large companies. Often it seems they are mainly concerned with little more than giving the appearance of getting tough. Only when faced with sustained public pressure will they come up with effective ways to rein in rogue corporations.

One Less Wheeler Dealer

It’s unfortunate that 18,000 people will lose their jobs in the process, but it is good news that Deutsche Bank is leaving the investment banking business. The world is better off with one less wheeling and dealing financial player that has repeatedly flouted all kinds of laws and regulations.

That tarnished record dates back to the late 1990s, when Deutsche Bank acquired New York-based Bankers Trust, which was testing the limits of what a commercial bank could do while getting embroiled in a series of scandals.

Just a few months after the acquisition was announced, Bankers Trust pleaded guilty to criminal charges that its employees had diverted $19 million in unclaimed checks and other credits owed to customers over to the bank’s own books to enhance its financial results. The bank paid a $60 million fine to the federal government and another $3.5 million to New York State.

Deutsche Bank was also having its own legal problems during this period. In 1998 its offices were raided by German criminal investigators looking for evidence that the bank helped wealthy customers engage in tax evasion. In 2004 investors who purchased what turned out to be abusive tax shelters from DB sued the company in U.S. federal court, alleging that they had been misled (the dispute was later settled for an undisclosed amount). That litigation as well as a U.S. Senate investigation brought to light extensive documentation of DB’s role in tax avoidance.

In the 2000s, DB was penalized repeatedly by financial regulators, including a 2004 settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in which it had to pay $87.5 million to settle charges of conflicts of interest between its investment banking and its research operations, and a $208 million settlement with federal and state agencies in 2006 to settle charges of market timing violations.

In 2009 the SEC announced that DB would provide $1.3 billion in liquidity to investors that the agency had alleged were misled by the bank about the risks associated with auction rate securities.

In 2010 the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that DB would pay $553 million and admit to criminal wrongdoing to resolve charges that it participated in transactions that promoted fraudulent tax shelters and generated billions of dollars in U.S. tax losses.

In 2011, the Federal Housing Finance Agency sued DB and other firms for abuses in the sale of mortgage-backed securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the case was settled for $1.9 billion in late 2013).

In 2012 the Southern District of New York announced that DB would pay $202 million to settle charges that its MortgageIT unit had repeatedly made false certifications to the Federal Housing Administration about the quality of mortgages to qualify them for FHA insurance coverage.

In 2013 DB agreed to pay a $1.5 million fine to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to settle charges that it had manipulated energy markets in California in 2010.

In 2013 Massachusetts fined Deutsche Bank $17.5 million for failing to inform investors of conflicts of interest during the sale of collateralized debt obligations. That same year, DB was fined $983 million by the European Commission for manipulation of the LIBOR interest rate index. (Later, in 2015, it had to agree to pay $2.5 billion to settle LIBOR allegations brought by U.S. and UK regulators.)

In 2015 the SEC announced that DB would pay $55 million to settle allegations that it overstated the value of its derivatives portfolio during the height of the financial meltdown. Later that year, DB agreed to pay $200 million to New York State regulators and $58 million to the Federal Reserve to settle allegations that it violated U.S. economic sanctions against countries such as Iran.

In January 2017 the bank reached a $7.2 billion settlement of a Justice Department case involving the sale of toxic mortgage securities during the financial crisis. That same month, it was fined $425 million by New York State regulators to settle allegations that it helped Russian investors launder as much as $10 billion through its branches in Moscow, New York and London.

In March 2017 Deutsche Bank subsidiary DB Group Services (UK) Limited was ordered by the U.S. Justice Department to pay a $150 million criminal fine in connection with LIBOR manipulation. The following month, the Federal Reserve fined DB $136 million for interest rate manipulation and $19 million for failing to maintain an adequate Volcker rule compliance program. Shortly thereafter, the Fed imposed another fine, $41 million, for anti-money-laundering deficiencies. In October 2017 DB paid $220 million to settle multistate litigation relating to LIBOR.

In 2018 DB paid a total of $100 million to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission–$70 million for interest-rate manipulation and $30 million for manipulation of metals futures contracts.

As a result of all these and other cases, Deutsche Bank ranks seventh among parent companies in Violation Tracker, with more than $12 billion in total penalties.

Not all these cases arose out of DB’s investment banking business. Its commercial banking operation, which will continue, was responsible for keeping the Trump Organization afloat when other banks shunned the shaky company. And it has just come to light that DB provided loans to the notorious Jeffrey Epstein.

Deutsche Bank’s history of controversies may not be over.

Will Prosecutors Get Tough with the Largest Corporate Lawbreakers?

By the standards of corporate law enforcement, the Justice Department is throwing the book at Insys Therapeutics. To resolve a civil and criminal case alleging that the company paid illegal kickbacks to healthcare providers to market its powerful opioid Subsys, DOJ required Insys to pay a total of $225 million in fines and forfeitures. Its operating subsidiary had to plead guilty to five counts of mail fraud.

A few weeks earlier, a federal jury in Massachusetts delivered guilty verdicts against the Insys founder John Kapoor (photo) and four former top executives on racketeering charges relating to the kickbacks and other actions such as misleading insurance companies about the need for Subsys, which was supposed to be used in limited circumstances by cancer patients but which Insys tried to get prescribed more widely.

Although Insys itself was offered a deferred prosecution agreement, the company has felt the effects of these legal setbacks. It has been forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, its stock price has plunged, and it has agreed to sell off Subsys.

If Insys ends up going out of business entirely – and if Kapoor and the others end up in prison for a substantial period of time – this will serve as a warning to other players in the pharmaceutical industry that there can be dire consequences for serious misconduct.

Yet the challenge for prosecutors is whether they can apply similar punishments to larger malefactors in the drug business and related sectors. Insys, after all, had only $82 million in revenue last year and has a workforce of only 226. Its disappearance from the scene would not cause major disruptions.

Consider the case of Johnson & Johnson, with over $80 billion in annual revenues and about 135,000 employees. Despite a carefully cultivated image of purity in connection with its products for infants, J&J has been involved in a series of scandals over the past decade. Violation Tracker shows that it has paid out more than $3 billion in penalties.

The company has received a lot of unfavorable attention in recent months in connection with allegations that it covered up internal concerns about possible asbestos contamination of its baby powder and other talc-based products. J&J has been hit with a flood of lawsuits and has already received some massive adverse verdicts.

The company is also on the defensive for its role in the opioid crisis, facing a lawsuit brought by the state of Oklahoma, which has already collected substantial settlements in related cases brought against Purdue Pharma and Teva Pharmaceutics. J&J may wish it had settled.

An expert witness in the case recently accused the company of contributing to a “public health catastrophe” and charged that its behavior in some ways was even worse than that of widely vilified Purdue. It remains to be seen whether a company of the size and prominence of J&J will be subjected to the same kind of federal prosecutorial offensive launched against Insys. It is only when business giants face existential threats for their misdeeds that we may see real change in corporate behavior.

Prosecuting Corporate Drug Dealers

It looked like another of the countless perp walks in which a newly arrested drug dealing suspect is paraded before the cameras by prosecutors. But this time the individual in handcuffs was a 75-year-old former chief executive of a major corporate pharmaceutical distributor.

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York charged Laurence F. Doud III with one count of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances – opioids – which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years, and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which carries a maximum prison term of five years.

It is rare enough for corporate executives (or in this case, a retired executive) to be individually prosecuted for anything in the United States. It was even more amazing in this case to see such a person facing the kind of charges normally brought against figures such as El Chapo.

U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman made it clear he was sending a message with the prosecution of Doud, who until 2017 ran the Rochester Drug Cooperative (RDC), which is among the top ten pharmaceutical distributors. Berman vowed that in combating the opioid epidemic his office would target not only street-level dealers but also “the executives who illegally distribute drugs from their boardrooms.”

In addition to Doud, Berman brought charges against William Pietruszewski, the company’s former chief compliance officer. Pietruszewski pled guilty to the charges and is said to be cooperating with prosecutors. Doud’s lawyer maintained his client’s innocence and claims Doud is being scapegoated by others at the company.

RDC itself was also targeted in the case, but the company was offered a non-prosecution agreement in exchange for a $20 million fine and an admission that it intentionally violated the federal narcotics laws by distributing dangerous, highly addictive opioids to pharmacy customers that it knew were being sold and used illicitly.

RDC’s deal is just the latest in a series of drug cases brought against companies. Violation Tracker lists about 90 instances in which corporations have been penalized under the Controlled Substances Act, but only six of these were criminal cases.

SDNY has opened an important new front in the battle against corporate involvement in the opioid crisis, complementing the wave of class action lawsuits brought against the likes of Purdue Pharma.

But for the offensive to be truly effective, it needs to target not just former executives like Doud but also those still in their posts. And it needs to go higher up the ladder from the likes of RDC to executives at the big three distributors: AmerisourceBergen Corporation, Cardinal Health, Inc., and McKesson Corporation.

These companies together generate more than half a trillion dollars in annual revenue and control more than 90 percent of the U.S. pharmaceutical wholesale market.

The opioid epidemic is the outcome of one of the most egregious cases of corporate irresponsibility in U.S. history. Both the companies themselves and those who ran them need to prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

A Reputation for Purity is Now in Tatters

For the tens of millions of baby boomers in the United States, the first large corporation whose products they encountered was probably Johnson & Johnson. That’s because the vast majority of parents in the postwar period used the company’s baby shampoo, oil and powder on their precious bundles of joy. Carefully cultivating an image of purity, J&J established itself as an indispensable part of infant care.

That image is now in tatters. The company just disclosed that it is being investigated by the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress in connection with possible asbestos contamination of its baby powder and other talc-based products. These probes were prompted by investigative reporting in outlets such as the New York Times alleging that J&J executives raised internal concerns about the asbestos issue decades ago but the company never acknowledged these publicly.

These revelations gave more credence to thousands of lawsuits filed against J&J in recent years by women, including many who used the company’s baby powder on themselves as well as their infants, charging that the products caused them to develop ovarian cancer. J&J has been losing a lot of these cases, including one in which a jury awarded $4.7 billion in damages to a group of 22 women.

Rarely has a product’s reputation fallen so far, and rarely has a company once held in such high esteem come to be regarded as morally equivalent to cigarette manufacturers. Yet a closer look at J&J’s track record shows that its immaculate reputation has been deteriorating for quite some time.

Over the past decade the company has been involved in a series of scandals and has been forced it to pay out large sums in civil settlements and criminal fines.

The most serious of those cases involved allegations that several of its subsidiaries marketed prescription drugs for purposes not approved as safe by the Food and Drug Administration, thus creating potentially life-threatening risks for patients.

For example, in 2013 the Justice Department announced that J&J and several of its subsidiaries would pay more than $2.2 billion in criminal fines and civil settlements to resolve allegations that the company had marketed it anti-psychotic medication Risperdal and other drugs for unapproved uses as well as allegations that they had paid kickbacks to physicians and pharmacists to encourage off-label usage. The amount included $485 million in criminal fines and forfeiture and $1.72 billion in civil settlements with both the federal government and 45 states that had also sued the company.

Other J&J problems resulted from faulty production practices. During 2009 and 2010 the company had to announce around a dozen recalls of medications, contact lenses and hip implants. The most serious of these was the massive recall of liquid Tylenol and Motrin for infants and children after batches of the medication were found to be contaminated with metal particles.

The company’s handling of the matter was so poor that its subsidiary McNeil-PPC became the subject of a criminal investigation and later entered a guilty plea and paid a criminal fine of $20 million and forfeited $5 million.

J&J also faced criminal charges in an investigation of questionable foreign transactions. In 2011 it agreed to pay a $21.4 million criminal penalty as part of a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department resolving allegations of improper payments by J&J subsidiaries to government officials in Greece, Poland and Romania in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The settlement also covered kickbacks paid to the former government of Iraq under the United Nations Oil for Food Program.

All of this has been a humiliating comedown for a company that was once regarded as a model of corporate social responsibility and which set the standard for crisis management in its handling of the 1980s episode in which a madman laced packages of Tylenol with cyanide. While the company was then being victimized, in the subsequent crises it mainly has itself to blame. Off-label marketing, faulty production practices and foreign bribery are bad, but the current scandal over asbestos contamination and the alleged cover-up pose a threat to the survival of the company.

The 2018 Corporate Rap Sheet

The Trump Administration has been taking steps to weaken its enforcement activities against corporate criminals and regulatory violators, but diligent prosecutors and career agency administrators are still trying to do their job. Over the course of 2018 there has been a steady stream of announcements of substantial penalties imposed on major corporations for a wide range of offenses. The following is a selection of significant cases resolved during the year:

Sale of Toxic Securities: In cases left over from the financial crisis of the 2000s, three major banks agreed to pay ten-figure settlements to the Justice Department to resolve allegations of misleading investors in residential mortgage-backed securities: $2 billion by Barclays, $2.1 billion by Wells Fargo and $4.9 billion by The Royal Bank of Scotland.

Interest Rate Benchmark Manipulation: The French bank Societe Generale agreed to pay $475 million to settle allegations by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it manipulated or attempted to manipulate LIBOR and other interest rate benchmarks.

Foreign Exchange Market Manipulation: The French bank BNP Paribas pleaded guilty to participating in a price-fixing scheme in the foreign exchange market and paid the U.S. Justice Department a criminal fine of $90 million.

Anti-Money Laundering Deficiencies: U.S. Bancorp agreed to a $453 million civil forfeiture to resolve a case brought by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York alleging that it violated the Bank Secrecy Act by failing to file required suspicious activity reports.

Foreign Corrupt Practices Act: The Securities and Exchange Commission required Panasonic Corporation to pay $143 million to resolve allegations of making improper payments and committing accounting fraud in connection with its global avionics business. It paid an additional $137.4 million to settle related criminal charges brought by the Justice Department.

Consumer Financial Protection Violation: Wells Fargo agreed to pay a total of $1 billion to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in connection with abuses relating to a mandatory insurance program tied to auto loans, mortgage interest-rate-lock extensions and other practices.

Product Safety Violation: Polaris Industries agreed to pay a $27.25 million civil penalty to settle Consumer Product Safety Commission allegations that it failed to immediately report to the agency that some of its recreational off-road vehicles contained defects that could create a substantial product hazard or that they created an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death.

Controlled Substances Act Violations: Rite Aid agreed to pay $4 million and CVS agreed to pay a total of $2.5 million in two cases, all to resolve allegations of improper distribution of controlled substances.

Sexual Harassment: Poultry processor Koch Foods agreed to pay $3.75 million to settle allegations made by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission involving sexual harassment, national origin and race discrimination and retaliation at a plant in Mississippi.

Clean Air Act Violations: The Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality announced that Shell Chemical would pay penalties of $350,000 and spend $10 million to install pollution control equipment to reduce harmful emissions at its plant in Norco, Louisiana.

False Claims Act Violations: Toyobo Co. of Japan and its American subsidiary agreed to pay $66 million to resolve claims under the False Claims Act that they sold defective Zylon fiber used in bulletproof vests that the United States purchased for federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies.

Bid-Rigging: South Korea-based companies SK Energy, GS Caltex, and Hanjin Transportation agreed to plead guilty to criminal charges and pay a total of approximately $82 million in criminal fines for their involvement in a decade-long bid-rigging conspiracy that targeted contracts to supply fuel to United States Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force bases in South Korea

Investor Protection Violations: AEGON USA Investment Management and three other Transamerica affiliates agreed to pay $97 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve allegations that they misled investors through the use of faulty financial models.

Hiring of Undocumented Workers: Waste Management Texas agreed to forfeit $5.5 million and entered into a non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas to resolve allegations that it hired numerous undocumented workers at its Houston operation.

Tax Evasion: The Swiss bank Zurcher Kantonalbank agreed to pay $98.5 million and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement to resolve charges that it conspired to help U.S. taxpayer-clients file false federal tax returns and hide hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts.

Data Breach: Uber agreed to pay $148 million to settle allegations that emerged from a nationwide investigation of a 2016 incident in which a hacker gained access to personal information on 57 million riders and drivers.

Note: Additional details on most of these cases can be found in Violation Tracker, which now contains 327,000 entries with total penalties of $440 billion, or in the next update of the database, scheduled to appear in mid-January.

Is There Still A Corporate Ulterior Motive Behind Criminal Justice Reform?

Is it just a coincidence that Donald Trump has decided to embrace criminal justice reform just at the time he is more likely to become a defendant himself? He’s not the only party that may have mixed motives in supporting the legislation that is being hyped as an outstanding expression of bipartisanship.

One of the prime movers behind the initiative has been Koch Industries, whose owners Charles and David Koch are the epitome of partisanship. Their role on this issue was initially puzzling, given that the Kochs were not known for supporting anything that was remotely progressive.

Three years ago, the full story began to emerge. The New York Times reported that one part of the reform being pushed by the Kochs and other business interests would require prosecutors to meet a more stringent standard in proving illicit intent, or “mens rea.” The Times stated that the Obama Justice Department was concerned that the change “would make it significantly harder to prosecute corporate polluters, producers of tainted food and other white-collar criminals.” PR Watch provided more detail on what the Kochs were up to.

In other words, what was made to look like a high-minded civic effort was also, at least in part, a move by corporations to shield themselves from prosecution. In the case of Koch Industries, the issue is far from a theoretical one. In Violation Tracker we document 275 cases in which the company has paid a total of $736 million for environmental, safety, employment and other offenses. One of these was a criminal case: In 2001 one of its subsidiaries pled guilty and paid $20 million to resolve allegations that it covered up Clean Air Act violations at an oil refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Mens rea “reform” is not part of the current criminal justice package, but the issue is far from dead. Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton just published an op-ed in USA Today calling for it to be added to the bill. Since Cotton’s support may be essential to passage, he may get his wish – and presumably the Kochs would be happy with that outcome.

Cotton is not the only one who has been beating this drum. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley have introduced mens rea legislation that would apply not only to criminal actions but also to “regulatory offenses.”

During the confirmation hearings on Brett Kavanaugh, Sen. Hatch brought up the issue of mens rea. He and the nominee both spoke enthusiastically on the need for “reform.” Here, as in much of the conservative discussion of the matter, proponents like to give the impression their concern is primarily with the rights of bank robbers and the like.

Yet it seems clear that the real intended beneficiaries are corporations and their executives supposedly being victimized by unjust regulations.

The issues surrounding criminal justice reform are complicated, but one thing is clear: it should not be used as a means of undermining the prosecution of corporate crime and misconduct.

DOJ is also Defying Trump on Foreign Bribery

Millions of words have been published about Donald Trump’s feud with the Justice Department over the Mueller investigation. Little is being written about another way in which DOJ is thwarting the president’s will: the ongoing prosecution of foreign bribery.

Starting before he became a candidate for the White House, Trump has railed against the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the 1977 law that allows for both civil and criminal cases to be brought against officials that engage in bribery and related practices committed anywhere in the world as long as their company does business in or has securities trading in the United States. He continued to complain about FCPA’s supposed unfairness after taking office.

These complaints seem to have had little effect on DOJ or on the Securities and Exchange Commission, which enforces the civil side of the law. Data collected for Violation Tracker, including a forthcoming update, show that since Trump took office DOJ and SEC have announced more than a dozen case resolutions with total penalties of more than $1.5 billion.

Several of those resolutions have been announced during the past two months. In early July DOJ and SEC each announced cases with combined penalties of $76 million against Credit Suisse and one of its subsidiaries for improperly winning banking business by giving jobs to family members and friends of Chinese government officials. Just the other day, the SEC announced that the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi would pay $25 million to resolve allegations that its subsidiaries in Kazakhstan and the Middle East made corrupt payments to win business.

It is true that many of the cases announced under Trump have involved foreign companies. Others include Japan’s Panasonic, Sweden’s Telia, and Canada’s Kinross Gold. Yet the culprits have also included some U.S.-based companies. Last year, for example, Halliburton had to pay $29 million to resolve allegations relating to its actions in Angola. Earlier this year, Dun & Bradstreet paid $9 million in connection with two of its subsidiaries in China. Most recently, investment manager Legg Mason agreed to pay more than $34 million to settle allegations that one of its subsidiaries was involved in a scheme to bribe officials in Libya.

While DOJ and SEC seem to be carrying out their mission of investigating FCPA violations by a wide range of companies, it remains to be seen whether that includes the Trump Organization, which according to various media reports may have corrupt practices act liability in a variety of countries (see, for example, The New Yorker piece on Azerbaijan).

This may be another test of whether Trump – and his business interests – are exempt from the law, but for now it is good to see that Trump has not succeeded in undermining an important tool in prosecuting other corporate bad actors.