Japan pressed to step up foreign bribery prosecutions

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Japan’s antibribery law, enacted in 1999, prohibits payments to foreign officials, but in the last 15 years, Japan had pursued only three prosecutions, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In April Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government implemented a plan to increase and improve enforcement and prosecution of foreign bribery cases. The plan was encouraging, said the OECD, but it “lacked important details,” such as clear guidelines for outlawing so-called facilitation payments to local officials by Japanese companies. The group expects to see a “more fully developed” plan by December and “a substantial increase in successful prosecutions and convictions in the near future.”

Read the story by Bruce Einhorn and Isabel Reynolds in Bloomberg Businessweek.

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