CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Corporate
Deferred, Non Prosecution Agreements Up 70 Percent in 2007
21 Corporate Crime Reporter 2, January 7, 2008
Corporate deferred and non prosecution agreements last year were up 70 percent
over the previous year.
The pre-trial agreements – now the standard method of settling federal major corporate crime investigations – totaled 34 in 2007 – up from 20 in 2006, according to a report that will be released at the March 2008 American Bar Association White Collar Crime Institute in Miami, Florida.
The report, titled Annual Corporate Pre-Trial Agreement Update 2007, was written by Lawrence Finder, a partner at Haynes & Boone in Houston, and Ryan McConnell, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Houston.
Eleven of the 34 agreements in 2007 involved violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the report found.
Only three of the agreements in 2006 involved FCPA violations.
Ten of the 2007 agreements involved violations of the federal health care laws. Before 2007, the authors identified only one such agreement involving health care.
Finder and McConnell also found that the number of publically available agreements containing attorney client privilege and work product waiver declined significantly.
They found only three 2007 deferred prosecution agreements that contained waivers, while none of the 2007 non pros agreements surveyed contained waivers.
“This worked out to approximately ten percent of the post-McNulty Memo agreements we were able to review – we could not locate seven of the thirty-four agreements,” Finder and McConnell wrote. “This was a decline of nearly fifty percent from the post-Thompson Memo (2003–2006) statistics we reviewed where twenty-six out of the total of forty-four agreements – or around sixty percent – contained waivers. We were unable to locate two of the 2003–2006 agreements.”
Roughly
half of the 2007 agreements surveyed required the appointment of monitors, the
report found.
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