The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has announced plans to expand its program to combat corruption in foreign countries. Roughly 30 agents will be assigned to offices in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, and given the sole task of detecting situations in which foreign governments are bribed by U.S. companies.
The aim is detect more violations, and to prevent corruption from having a ripple effect in the U.S. or destabilizing foreign governments. Countries that have already been hit by scandals in the past, like Mexico, will generate more attention from the FBI.
“Mexico is one of our principal partners. U.S. companies already do a great amount of business there and there have already been several cases of corruption,” said William Steinman, a Washington defense lawyer who specializes in foreign corruption cases. “We hope that the monitoring of key markets continues.”
The FBI initiative is designed to uphold the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes bribery of foreign officials for business a crime and prosecutes cases in U.S. courts.
More than 50 people have been convicted under that law since 2009, and some 50 corporations have paid more than $3 billion in penalties during the same time period.
There have been several high profile bribery cases in Mexico, involving companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Walmart.