On the occasion of International Anti-Corruption Day and the seventh anniversary of the creation of the French Anti-Corruption Agency (AFA), Saturday December 9, its new director, Isabelle Jégouzo, looks back on the results of her agency and the risks that businesses and communities face.
Third part of the French anti-corruption triptych with the High Authority for Transparency in Public Life and the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF), the AFA’s mission is to advise businesses, administrations and local authorities on the implementation of systems prevention and detection of integrity violations, but also to control these entities, in order to ensure that the systems put in place are sufficiently robust.
What issues does the AFA respond to?
To fully understand the role of the AFA, we must go back to the time of its creation, when the Sapin 2 law was adopted. [destinée à améliorer la transparence de la vie économique], in December 2016. During the preceding years, several large French companies were prosecuted for violations of probity abroad, particularly in the United States. The services of the American Department of Justice are particularly vigilant on these subjects.
In the United States, corruption is not only an offense but also an act that distorts the balance of competition – a concept to which Americans are very sensitive. Acts of corruption are therefore particularly prosecuted, including when they are committed by foreign companies in conditions which have only a tenuous link with the United States, such as commercial exchanges denominated in dollars. The American Department of Justice justified its extraterritorial action by the failure of other States in the fight against corruption.
Which was not completely false: in October 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development issued a report very critical of France on this subject. However, when French companies were subject to prosecution in the United States, these were most often resolved through transactions with, as a result, significant fines paid to the American Treasury and compliance programs which were followed. by an American instructor.
With a risk of industrial espionage for French companies, which had to give access to all their documents to American control teams?
You have 75% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.