Welcome back to the podcast, bribes,windle, or steal.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and my guest today is Marika Bakr.

Marika is a partner with Nauta Duttle in Amsterdam.

She specializes in internal investigations and defending corporate

clients in complex criminal and regulatory matters. Thank you for joining me, Marika.

It's my pleasure. Five years ago, the OECD hit the Netherlands pretty hard for inadequate

enforcement, but a lot has happened since then. Can you review some of the highlights

for us? Why is it the Netherlands are suddenly right at the forefront of enforcement? Well,

I like to believe that's because of the OACD report, but frankly, I think that we just got a little lucky. I think that since the OECD report,

a lot of foreign bribery investigations have been initiated by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service,

and a few of them involve investigations of the US authorities as well, like the SBM

offshore case, the Vimpochom case and Tilia Company case.

And I think it's because of the US involvement and the global enforcement and co-operations

between the US and Dutch authorities. it is why the Dutch were able

to step up the way they did in the enforcement of foreign corruption. It's interesting, though,

because the U.S. is willing to cooperate with any OECD country or any country, for that matter, to advance

anti-bribery enforcement. But for some reason, it really worked with the Dutch authorities.

Do you have any insight into a special relationship, or is it just coincidental that there

were so many cases in such a short time? Yeah, I think that's partly because coincidentally,

there were a lot of cases with the Dutch nexus.

You know, the Netherlands is an exporting country.

So a lot of Dutch companies have subsidiaries in other jurisdictions,

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