1. Home
  2. |Insights
  3. |FCPA’s Ever-Expanding Reach Goes Private

FCPA’s Ever-Expanding Reach Goes Private

Client Alert | 1 min read | 12.19.07

As U.S. regulators continue to explore new, more aggressive ways to prosecute foreign bribery under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Department of Justice has sent a clear warning that prosecution is not reserved for publicly traded companies on U.S. exchanges or their executives.


The DOJ announced yesterday that it had arrested a Los Angeles film executive and his wife on a criminal complaint. DOJ alleges that the couple paid more than $1.7 million in bribes to a Thai tourism official to obtain contracts worth approximately $10 million for their private company to run an international film festival in Bangkok. The complaint further alleges that the couple attempted to conceal the bribes by using multiple business entities and making “commission” payments through intermediaries and foreign bank accounts.


While the vast majority of FCPA individual prosecutions have focused on executives at publicly traded companies, by charging this case, the DOJ has reiterated that private individuals and companies are also within the crosshairs of FCPA enforcement.




Insights

Client Alert | 2 min read | 09.22.25

Department of Education Discontinues Discretionary Grant Funding for Minority-Serving Institutions

The Department of Education (DOE) announced on September 10, 2025, that it will end discretionary funding to several Minority-Serving Institution (MSI) grant programs that, it stated, “discriminate by conferring government benefits exclusively to institutions that meet racial or ethnic quotas.”[1] The agency stated that it would “us[e] its statutory authority to reprogram discretionary funds to programs that do not present such concerns.”[2] This announcement follows a July 2025 decision by the Department of Justice to no longer defend the constitutionality of a provision of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) that authorizes grant funding to Hispanic-Serving institutions, after determining that such programs “violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.”[3]...