On 15 July 2023 the Italian National Anti-Corruption Authority issued the new interpretative Guidelines of Legislative Decree no. 24/2023, implementing the EU Whistleblowing Directive. The new Guidelines aim at providing practical guidance to those employers that, pursuant to the new law, are now required to implement their own internal reporting channels.
Our latest Doing Business in South Africa Guide outlines some of the principal matters affecting an overseas entity that wishes to establish and operate a business in the country. The Guide offers a range of practical advice and useful guidance for entities seeking to do business in the country.
Our popular Annual Compliance Conference, which attracts over 6,000 in-house senior legal and compliance professionals from across the world, will be held across five weeks from 5 September – 5 October 2023.
Welcome to the 2023 edition of Baker McKenzie’s Doing Business in Canada, a practical guide to the business and investment legal framework and developments in Canada. We hope that you find this guide a useful and practical resource.
On 27 June 2023, the US Departments of State, the Treasury, Labor, Commerce, and Homeland Security, and the United States Agency for International Development issued a joint advisory — the Africa Gold Advisory — that (i) highlights the opportunities and specific risks raised by the gold trade across sub-Saharan Africa and (ii) encourages industry participants to adopt and apply strengthened due diligence practices to guard against such risks.
KPPU (the Indonesian Competition Commission) continues its enforcement against rigged bids, although bid-rigging investigations no longer dominate its caseloads. Initial indications of rigged bids have been confirmed by the issuance of KPPU Chairman Regulation No. 3 of 2023 on Guidelines on Tender Conspiracy Prohibition.
In an effort to address Vietnam’s historical perception as a high-risk compliance jurisdiction, the Vietnamese government has recently implemented a series of regulatory and practical measures to significantly reduce corrupt practices in the country.
These recent efforts to combat corruption have resulted in a number of measures, including legal reforms, public awareness campaigns, international cooperation efforts, as well as increased enforcement of corruption and bribery laws (including a number of high profile arrests and prosecutions for bribery offences). These trends in Vietnam show no sign of slowing down, and heightened enforcement of corruption-related crimes in Vietnam can be expected to continue and even increase in the months and years to come.
Baker McKenzie’s Sanctions Blog published the alert titled EU extends scope of Russia sanctions designated person categories on 14 June 2023. Read the article via the link here. Please also visit our Sanctions Blog for the most recent updates.
On 3 May 2023, the European Commission presented to the European Parliament and the Council a proposal for a Directive on fighting corruption. The proposal, which refers to corruption in both the public and private sector, provides for the extension of the list of criminal offenses in each EU Member State to include misappropriation, trading in unlawful influence, abuse of functions, as well as obstruction of justice and unlawful enrichment. In addition, the proposal provides for the increase in the level of applicable sanctions and the harmonization of aggravating and mitigating circumstance.
The Department of Justice issued a series of Circulars that modify criminal procedure in the Philippines, by introducing the “reasonable certainty of conviction” standard when pursuing criminal cases, and implementing procedures that ensure proactive involvement by prosecutors during case build-up.