Important changes will shortly be made to the law governing bribery. This is something which all businesses will need to be aware of as the legislation will make companies liable for the actions of people associated with them – it will be essential for you to be able to show that you have taken adequate steps to prevent bribery. In this series of articles, I will look at how the law is going to change, what it means for businesses and what steps they should be taking to ensure compliance.
Bribery is currently covered by the common law and some statutory provisions covering bribery of public officials. A traditional definition of bribery is the receiving or offering of undue reward by or to any person whatsoever in a public office in order to influence his behaviour in office and to incline him to act contrary to known rules of honesty and integrity (Russell on Crime, 1964).
In 1998, the United Kingdom signed up to an international treaty laying down standards for dealing with bribery, the OECD Bribery Convention. In subsequent years however, and particularly following concerns over the way in which bribery allegations relating to BAe Systems were handled, the OECD has regarded UK law on bribery as failing to meet the standards required by the Convention. As a result, the Bribery Act 2010 was passed by Parliament. It was originally due to come into force in April 2011 but this has been delayed pending publication of the guidance which is to be issued alongside the Act. It is still anticipated however that the Act will come into force in its current form and so businesses need to be prepared.
The Act covers:
- Offences relating to the offering of bribes
- Offences relating to the taking of bribes
- Bribery of foreign officials
- Failure of commercial organisations to prevent bribery and the ‘adequate procedures’ defence
- Penalties
The rest of the articles in this series will look at these areas but for now it is important to note that a commercial organisation is guilty of an offence if a person associated with it bribes another person intending to obtain or retain business or a business advantage for the commercial organisation. The organisation will have a defence if it can show that it had adequate procedures in place which were designed to prevent bribery. We will see that the definition of ‘bribery’ is wide and somewhat vague, possibly covering some things which we might normally consider corporate hospitality, so it would be dangerous for any business to assume that this has nothing to do with them.
Please check back for future articles in this series over the next few weeks or subscribe to either this blog or our twitter feeds for updates.
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