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Editor’s Note: The ACAMS moneylaundering.com legal team examines significant enforcement actions related to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations amid a shift in U.S. priorities.

On Feb. 11, President Donald Trump suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, marking a significant shift in U.S. policy after FCPA-related penalties from federal prosecutors and regulators surged from $630 million in 2023 to $2.5 billion last year.

The largest FCPA-related settlement of 2024 arrived in October, when RTX Corporation, formerly Raytheon Company, agreed to pay $947 million to defer prosecution after the Justice Department accused the Arlington, Virginia-based defense contractor of willfully conspiring to violate export controls, bribing a high-ranking Qatari military official and engaging in fraud.

Raytheon agreed to pay an additional $102 million in civil penalties and disgorgement in a parallel action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which accused the company of violating the anti-bribery, internal-accounting and books-and-records provisions of the FCPA.

Ten months earlier, on Jan. 10, 2024, German software company SAP SE agreed to pay $222 million to the Justice Department and $99 million to the SEC for violating the FCPA by employing third-party intermediaries and consultants in various schemes to bribe officials in South Africa, Indonesia, Malawi, Kenya, Tanzania and Ghana.

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn followed on March 1 by tagging Swiss commodities trader Gunvor S.A. with $662 million in FCPA-related fines and forfeitures for using former employees and at least one offshore entity as intermediaries to funnel tens of millions of dollars in bribes to officials in Ecuador and Petroecuador, a state-run oil company, from 2012 to 2020.

Roughly $93 million of that amount covered Gunvor’s related penalties in Ecuador and Switzerland, where the Office of the Attorney General secured a conviction against the company for bribing foreign officials.

Albemarle Corporation, a chemical manufacturer in Charlotte, North Carolina, paid the largest FCPA-related outlay of 2023 after using third-party sales agents and employees of subsidiaries to bribe officials in Vietnam, Indonesia and India from 2009 to 2017.

All told, the company paid $197 million to the Justice Department to avoid prosecution and an additional $104 million in disgorgement and pre-judgment interest to the SEC.

By far the largest FCPA-related settlement of the past five years involved none other than a U.S. bank, Goldman Sachs, which agreed in October 2020 to pay nearly $3 billion after former senior employees helped siphon $2.7 billion from 1MDB, a now-defunct state fund in Malaysia, and arranged hundreds of millions of dollars of bribes to Malaysian and Emirati officials.

Trump announced his decision to shelve the FCPA via an executive order on Feb. 10, four days after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi disclosed plans to scrap the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, a Justice Department-led effort to seize and return the proceeds of foreign corruption.

Among other high-profile cases, the Kleptocracy Initiative, which the Justice Department launched in July 2010, played a key role in the recovery of hundreds of millions of dollars that Malaysian officials, including then-Prime Minister Najib Razak, and their associates stole and laundered from 1MDB more than a decade ago.

Bondi’s memo, which also dismantles a related taskforce that the Justice Department launched in the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, shifts human and material resources away from anti-corruption and towards the elimination of cartels in Mexico and other transnational crime syndicates.

Contact Silas Bartels at sbartels@acams.org