CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
House Dems Challenge Chamber of Commerce on FCPA
26 Corporate Crime Reporter 22, May 22, 2012
Democrats on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee today escalated their probe into the Chamber of Commerce’s campaign against the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
In a letter to Chamber President Tom Donahue, Congressman Elijah Cummings and Henry Waxman (D-California) revealed a survey finding that 14 out of 55 board members of the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform – almost one in four – were affiliated with companies that were reportedly under investigation for violations or had settled allegations that they violated the FCPA.
“We are concerned about these apparent conflicts of interest,” Cummings and Waxman write to Donahue. “ILR is a not-for-profit advocacy organization affiliated with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In October 2010, it issued recommendations to change the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that would significantly undermine the law.”
“For example, ILR recommended limiting a company' s liability for the actions of a company it has acquired, adding a "willfulness" requirement for corporate criminal liability, and limiting a parent company's liability for the acts of its subsidiary.”
“Yet nowhere did ILR disclose that over a dozen of the corporations represented on its board have violated or have been under investigation for violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” they wrote.
The Committee’s Democrat staff is investigating allegations that top Wal-Mart executives “orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance” in Mexico.
As part of this investigation, the staff sent a letter to the Chamber on April 25, 2012, raising concerns about reportss that two high-level Wal-Mart executives were on the ILR.
On May 4, 2012, the Chamber sent a response to our letter, “which failed to answer any of our questions and provided no information about the relationship between Wal-Mart executives and your organization's push for changes to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” Cummings and Waxman wrote.
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