UK firm fined £2.2m for paying bribes in Kenya and Mauritania
A small British printing company has been fined £2.2 million for making corrupt payments of about £400,000 to public officials in Kenya and Mauritania.
The bribes were paid by Smith & Ouzman Ltd – which becomes the first UK company convicted for overseas bribery – in exchange for contracts to print ballot papers.
Smith & Ouzman was fined earlier this month at a court in South London after the company and two of its former directors, Christopher Smith and Nicholas Smith, had been found guilty in December 2014 under the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906, which applies to acts before the UK’s Bribery Act 2010 came into force in July 2011.
In a comment on the case, CMS Cameron McKenna, a London-based multinational law firm, noted: “This case is significant because it is the first UK conviction of a corporate for overseas bribery offences following a contested trial and it provides helpful guidance as to how the courts will apply the relevant sentencing guidelines for fraud, bribery and money laundering offences going forward.”
Investigations into the matter by the UK’s Serious Fraud Office took four years, and in the end it became a milestone for the SFO, which managed to get the first UK company to be convicted of corruption by a jury.
Cameron McKenna explains: “The SFO’s success in securing a conviction of Smith & Ouzman was in part due to the fact that as a small, family-owned printing company, corporate attribution was easier to establish than it would have been in the case of a larger corporate.
“This is because the English identification principle – the need to attribute guilty knowledge to the directing mind of the company – means that the involvement in the corrupt conduct of the directing mind is easier to establish when small companies are involved.
“In the case of Smith & Ouzman the chairman, Christopher Smith, and sales and marketing director Nicholas Smith, were both convicted as well.”
The law firm noted that David Green, the Director of the SFO, had frequently complained about the inadequacy of English law on corporate criminal liability.
But Cameron McKenna said that despite this, the UK government shelved plans to review a section of the Bribery Act 2010 to see whether it should be extended to encompass a wider range of economic crimes.
The court did not award compensation to Kenya and Mauritania, which Cameron McKenna said was unusual.
“While the judge acknowledged that the people of Kenya and Mauritania were victims in this case, attempts to liaise with their respective governments as to compensation had not provided satisfactory evidence that any compensation would be delivered into the ‘right hands’,” Cameron McKenna said.
The judge’s decision, the law firm explained, was based on the fact that there had been no formal request for compensation from either Kenya or Mauritania.
Source: GNA