Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today I'm catching up with Nicola Banucci.

He is the former chief legal officer, the general counsel at the OECD, and now a partner in Paul

Hastings, Paris office.

Nicola has been on the podcast before, but I'm going to ask him to work twice as hard this time and

cover two topics for us. The first is the new OECD recommendation, and the second is a related

but slightly more esoteric topic. And that's the different approach needed, if indeed a different

approach is needed, when working with countries with civil law as opposed to common law on anti-corruption measures.

Nicola, thank you for joining me.

Happy to be here.

Why don't you start with the recommendations?

You wrote a great piece for the FCPA blog and laid some of these out.

But why don't you talk

us through not only what they contain, but how important or relevant do you think they are?

Yes, Alexandra. I think this recommendation, in fact, goes beyond my own expectations. Having

followed the working group on bribery for 20 years, I feel that I know the working group on bribery quite well, but I've been really pleasantly surprised.

And let me explain to you why this is not only an update, but can really be a game changer.

So for the first time, the OECD working group on bribe and the OECD basically will tackle

demand side. This is a new section in the recommendation. In 2018, the OECD issued a report,

which indicated that even when both the briber and the bribe were parties to the OECD Anti-Bribery

Convention, around 50 cases, in all those 50 cases in which the bribees were parties to the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, around 50 cases.

In all those 50 cases in which the briber had been investigated and sanctioned,

...