O

Summary

Odebrecht see Operation Carwash

OECD Anti-Bribery Convention

A legal instrument enacted by the OECD which establishes standards for the parties to criminalize bribery of foreign public officials in international business transactions.

The Convention was signed in 1997 and came into force in 1999. All 38 OECD member states are signatories, along with six other countries: Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Peru, Russia and South Africa. Signatories are required to put into place domestic legislation that is in compliance with the Convention, and this has underpinned key laws such as the UK Bribery Act and France's Loi Sapin II.

The negotiations to agree the Convention were strongly supported by the government of the United States, where multinational companies had expressed concerns that the strong anti-bribery provisions of the FCPAmeant they were not operating on a level playing field when compared to overseas competitors for whom foreign bribery was not illegal. The Convention was also strongly encouraged by Transparency International.

The Convention is organized into 17 articles that cover themes including: the definition of the offence of bribery of foreign public officials, the responsibility of legal persons, sanctions that should be imposed for this offence, provisions for mutual legal assistance, and, most significantly, the responsibility of legal persons (in other words, making companies legally liable for bribe-paying by their employees). There are a series of related documents that help the reader to better understand the scope of the Convention, including Guidelines and Commentaries, as well as formal update Recommendations from 2009 – covering among other areas facilitation payments and demand-side bribery – and 2021, covering areas including companies’ anti-bribery compliance procedures, use of non-trial resolutions for bribery cases and whistleblower protection.

The OECD Convention is widely considered to be one of the most important and successful international anti-bribery instruments, ascribed both to its focus on a single important issue and the rigour of its implementation review mechanism for monitoring signatory countries’ implementation and enforcement through the OECD Anti-Bribery Working Group.