Welcome back to the podcast, Bribes, Windler-Steel, or Steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're at the OECD in Paris, where I'm speaking with Tina

Sereda. Tina is a professor of law and economics, the Norwegian School of Economics. She's very

active in a number of projects, including the working group reviewing refinements to the Trace

Matrix. She has projects with the OECD, the EU, the World Bank, and others. For our purposes

today, though, she's on the IBA subcommittee looking at settlements for corruption cases and how those can be harmonized.

So thank you for joining me, Tina.

Thank you for inviting.

Why don't you start by describing the problem that your group is addressing?

Well, we consider the way corporate liability in corruption cases is enforced around the world. And we realize that there's

definitely a need for more harmonization. What we see is that in many countries, it is extremely

difficult to hold corporations liable. We have the problems with financial secrecy, complex

corporate structures, the use of trust, but also the fact that criminal law requires means that we need to identify individual guilt and so on.

And that is a very complicated thing when it comes to corporations.

So what we observe now is that enforcement agencies are using pragmatic approaches in the way they enforce

corporate liability. They try to encourage corporations to self-report and cooperate in the investigation,

and they offer settlements as a pretrial solution, which ends the case. That brings certainty to companies. They

have more predictability around the situation, and it also takes some of the burden off of

the prosecutors. Is that the idea? We hope to get there, but at present, when we look at the

regimes around the world, we see that the principles and the

practices, they go in all directions.

There's not a harmonized system.

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