Abstract
Since the early 2000s, the United States’ different administrations of justice have been prosecuting foreign companies suspected of violating US laws on bribery of foreign public officials and of failing to respect embargoes and economic sanctions. Even if these violations take place outside US borders, the American prosecution authorities (including the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Office of Foreign Assets Control) consider themselves legitimate to intervene. European multinationals have been particularly sanctioned. For instance, in 2014, fines reached up to 9 billion dollars for the French bank BNP, which was accused of using dollars in its transactions with certain countries sanctioned by the US (mainly Iran, Cuba and Sudan). Punishing companies and hitting them in the wallet are not the only objectives of the American administration. The United States takes advantage of legal procedures against foreign companies to collect millions of bytes of data, sometimes including sensitive information on them as well as on their partners and markets. Facing this legal offensive, Europe is still struggling to provide responses to protect its companies.
Highlights
Since the early 2000s, the United States’ different administrations of justice have been prosecuting foreign companies suspected of violating US laws on bribery of foreign public officials and of failing to respect embargoes and economic sanctions
The US extraterritoriality law consists of legislation passed by the US Congress that are applicable, according to the authorities, outside the borders of the United States
The first is the fight against corruption through the Foreign Corruption Practice Act (FCPA) passed in 1977 under the Carter administration
Summary
The greatest legal-economic warrior of the current age is the United States. Since the mid-1990s, the US has been exporting its legislation all over the world. Cases in point are the famous ‘rogue states’ on Washington’s blacklists: Cuba, Libya, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Myanmar These veritable diktats expose any company that continues to do business with such countries to prosecution by the US authorities.. In recent years the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (HelmsBurton) and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (D’Amato-Kennedy) have been developing their extraterritorial potential They apply to any company and any individual worldwide. In the eyes of many observers I have met in the course of my investigations, the export of US legislation is suspect.4 It does aim at doing good by sanctioning anti-democratic political regimes and corrupt companies and individuals. Antoine Garapon, magistrate and secretary general of the Institut des hautes études sur la justice (Institute for Advanced Studies on Justice), and Pierre Servan-Schreiber, a lawyer at the Paris and New York bars, who edited one of the few books on the subject, think that the US’s motivations are not pure: ‘It is no more and no less than a new way of governing that is being put in place, involving a new use of power: more pragmatic, more efficient, and more insidious, in which the interests of American power and the moralization of business are mixed up to the point of confusion’ (Garapon and Servan-Schreiber 2013: 6)
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