MyComplianceOffice Blog

The Combatting Foreign Bribery (CFB) Bill aims to reform Australia’s foreign bribery offences. It passed Federal Parliament on 29 February 2024 and will come into effect six months after the Governor-General formally accepts it and provides Royal Assent.

A conflict of interest happens when a person with multiple interests serves one to the detriment of another. For example, an individual may seek to create personally-beneficial outcomes at the expense of fairness and competition. They may engage in activities that put the confidentiality of their firms’ information at risk or put personal financial gains ahead of their firms’, clients’, or broader financial market’s interests.

Hong Kong has become one of the most corruption-free nations in the world. The Transparency International 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), the most widely used global corruption ranking system, lists Hong Kong as the 12th most ‘clean’ nation out of 180. The system measures how corrupt a country’s public sector is perceived to be, according to experts and businesspeople.

“We can’t change human nature, or the pressures of business and the economic/political backdrop, but we can change how we deal with compliance” states Crispin Rapinet,  partner at Hogan Lovells, in the 2020 report providing an overview of the challenges for multinationals on all aspects of anti-bribery & corruption.

The report highlights how multinationals in Europe, the U.S., and Asia are dealing with the pressure of global growth while balancing  ABC's concerns when investing in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) is a United States law and prohibits firms and individuals from paying bribes to foreign officials in pursuit of business deals. In the past years, we haven’t seen many FCPA-related trials, however, in 2019 we saw the FCPA convicting four defendants in three trials.