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The issue: Canada has been greatly lenient in combating illegal practices that occur offshore, and they also were late in enforcing laws that would deter Canadian corporations from conducting in an unethical manner internationally.
CFPOA: is Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act , An Act respecting the corruption of foreign public officials and the implementation of the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, and to make related amendments to other Acts (1).
Explanation: The organization of economic co-operation (OECD)had launched a convention in 1997 in order of signatures to enforce laws against bribery in foreign public officials. (2) And in reaction of the OECD’s order Canada enforced corruption of foreign public officials act in 1999, but Canada didn’t do anything for 10 years but a little to enforce this law and by that time a lot of co-operations were taking advantage, such as SNC Lavalin.
Only in 2008 did Canada’s national Royal Canadian Mounted Police create a special office, the International Anti-Corruption Unit (IACU), to target corporate offenders. (3). the first actual prosecution was against an oil and gas company called Niko resources LTD in 2011. After lagging for a very long time Canada was pointed out to be the country that was simply not doing much. In September/2012 Canada started taking the issue seriously and started working to fix the issue and has been named as one of the best three countries improving in fighting corruption.
At that time of the year SNC was already falling down with all the corruption it had, after that its CEO at the time, Pierre Duhaime, was arrested and now faces multiple fraud-related charges. Its former vice president of construction is in a Swiss prison on corruption charges relating to Libya. Two other dismissed executives have filed lawsuits against SNC-Lavalin, claiming they’ve been treated as scapegoats amid allegations of bribery. (4) Now investigations for ANC are undergoing in more than three countries after all the corruption they had.
The difference between the American and Canadian law (a big bulk of the issue),
One of the huge issues was that Canada’ laws are very different than the American laws and how they approach them for an example in our case the CFPOA is less affective in Canada than the united-states because Canada requires very high standard of proof for convictions and without a high standard of proof there will not be an investigation, “The Americans have administrative laws and offences, called books and records offences,” she says. “It’s one thing to prove the bribery. That can be really hard. But it can be easier to prove that the books were cooked to cover up what was probably an illicit payment. (5) “The Americans have that not just on the criminal law side of things but on the securities law side of things. So you don’t have the same burden of proof.” (6). As read above the American law doesn’t need a high standard of proof to order an investigation it is enough to know that the books were cooked to have the right to investigate which makes it easier.
(7)
