United Kingdom, France, and Switzerland Establish Joint Taskforce on International Bribery

On February 10, 2025, United States President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order that drastically altered the landscape of global efforts to combat international bribery and corruption.  Falsely declaring that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the United States’ key legislation that criminalizes foreign public-official bribery, ‘has been systematically, and to a steadily increasing degree, stretched beyond proper bounds and abused in a manner that harms the interests of the United States’, he directed the ‘pausing’ of the United States Department of Justice’s (USDOJ’s) enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) for at least 180 days.

Because the Justice Department has played such a prominent role in prosecuting foreign bribery since 1977, this unprecedented ‘pause’ in FCPA enforcement – which currently includes halting any new FCPA investigations or enforcement actions – has suddenly prompted numerous questions about the ramifications of President Trump’s order, including whether and how the international community would respond.  An important first step in that regard occurred on March 20, when the United Kingdom Serious Fraud Office (SFO), the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG), and the French National Prosecution Office (PNF) jointly announced the establishment of the International Anti-Corruption Prosecutorial Taskforce.

The announcement stated that the Taskforce is slated to deliver (1) a Leaders’ Group ‘focused on the regular exchange of insights and strategy’; (2) a Working Group, ‘for the purpose of devising proposals for co-operation on cases’; (3) increase best-practice sharing, ‘to make full use of our combined expertise’; and (4) ‘[a] strengthened foundation for seizing opportunities for operational collaboration’.  In addition, it invited other like-minded agencies involved in tackling internation al bribery and corruption to join the Taskforce.

Each of the three founding agencies has significant prior experience not only in investigating and prosecuting foreign bribery, but in binational or multinational collaboration on such cases. For example, in 2018 the DOJ and the PNF collaborated in obtaining $585 million in foreign-bribery criminal penalties involving Société Générale S.A., and in 2020 DOJ, SFO, and PNF collaborated in obtaining $3.9 billion in foreign-bribery criminal penalties involving Airbus.  In addition, there are other well-established international legal mechanisms for multinational cooperation in corruption-related investigations, such as the Joint Investigative Teams (JITs) that can be established under Article 49 of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption and Article 13 of the European Union Convention on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters.

In the short term, the new Taskforce cannot wholly make up for the likely extended absence of the USDOJ from foreign-bribery enforcement.  But its existence, coupled with the possible addition of more European enforcement agencies to its ranks, provides an important signal to companies operating transnationally that they would do well to ignore President Trump’s veiled invitation to resume foreign-official bribery as ‘routine business practices’.

Jonathan Rusch is an Adjunct Professor at the American University Washington College of Law.