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

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're continuing our series on the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention,

with a discussion about the new recommendation on non-trial resolutions.

My guest, Peter Somsen, worked hard on this part

of the recommendation while a member of the OECD Secretary General's High Level Advisory Group,

an independent body. Peter is the former General Counsel of GE Health, Siemens, and AIG,

and I'll be known to many of you as he's been on this podcast before. Thanks so much

for joining me, Peter. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me. What problem does this

recommendation address? Were you focused on just the lack of uniformity from country to country,

the overt hostility in some jurisdictions? What problem did you set out to solve?

I'd say actually all of the above because the recommendation addresses many issues, but I'd say

the primary one was the acceptability of settlements. You can't even use the word settlement.

In fact, that's why it's called non-trial resolutions

in the recommendation. And making settlements, non-trial resolutions, acceptable,

advisable, desirable to prosecution agencies around the world is just sea change. And that was the

major effort we were after. You've referred to it as a sea change, as a game changer in past

conversations. Why do you see this as significant as that? Many countries, a country, for example,

where I worked for many years, Germany, the notion of settling is just contrary to all of their

jurisprudence. So you have the problem that while

the Munich prosecutors are very sophisticated about this and can figure out ways to reason their way

through and rationalize their way through to what is basically a settlement using sort of jurisprudential

gymnastics, you go 100 miles north through a different jurisdiction. These kinds of things are not

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