Global Regulatory Enforcement Law Blog : Global Regulatory Enforcement Lawyers & Attorneys: Reed Smith Law Firm: Government Contracts & Compliance

This post was written by Rosanne M. Kay and Tom Webley.

The waiting is over! At last the UK Ministry of Justice has published guidance about procedures which commercial organisations can put into place to prevent persons associated with them from bribing. The Act will now come into force on 1 July 2011.

The guidance offers non-prescriptive procedures and commentary on the scope of the Act. As the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke, said this morning in his statement on the publication of the guidance "These are quite tough rules. But what the guidance I am also publishing today underlines – after helpful consultation with businesses, and NGOs – is that combating bribery is about common sense, not bureaucracy."

At the core of the guidance are proportionality and risk assessment which should give comfort to those small and medium sized enterprises worried at the prospect of having to spend a fortune on putting in place complex, burdensome polices and procedures. Of limited comfort is the Secretary of State's indication that there will not be a large number of prosecutions and certainly not for trivial cases but these decisions are not his to make and will be decided by the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Director of the Serious Fraud Office. 

Click here for more information about the guidance.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

This post was written by Rosanne M. Kay and Suzie A. Savage.

It is understood that the UK Ministry of Justice will publish its guidance on adequate procedures tomorrow, Wednesday 30th March 2011.

The Act was originally scheduled to be implemented in April of this year, three months after guidance was to be published in January about the “adequate procedures” firms should have in place to prevent bribery.  The Act will now apparently come into force in June/July 2011. 

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link

This post was written by Rosanne Kay and Neil Donovan.

The UK Ministry of Justice (“MoJ”) official with responsibility for managing the implementation of the Bribery Act 2010 (“Act”) provided an update on the status and content of the revised adequate procedures guidance during a speech last Thursday. 

The speech covered the following:

• Timeframe- according to the official, the delayed adequate procedures guidance will be published “as soon as possible” but set no specific date. There is still no information about when the Act will come into force but the MoJ has promised a three month gap between publication of the guidance and the coming into force of the Act.
• Principles in the Guidance- the six guiding principles contained in the draft of the guidance released last year will remain but the revised guidance will differ “quite substantially” from the previous version.

The timing of the adequate procedures guidance and the Act remain unclear. The content of the guidance is also apparently in a state of flux. Nevertheless, companies who are waiting for the guidance to implement changes to their policies and procedures may wish to reconsider. It will almost certainly take most companies more than three months to plan and make changes and they may run out of time.

• Email This
• Print
• Comments
• Trackbacks
• Share Link