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

I'm Alexander Rogi, and we're recording today's interview in person in Beijing.

My guest is the Director for Legal Affairs at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the OECD.

He's also the coordinator for accession to the OECD,

and since 1997, he's been intimately involved in the monitoring and follow-up

of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, which is what we'll be discussing today.

Nicola Banucci, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you, Alixander.

It says something about your travel schedule that we have to come to China to record this podcast.

Why do you start, there'll be people listening to the podcast, which is general about financial crime,

who won't have a whole lot of background.

Can you just tell us how we came to have the OECD Anti-Corruption Convention?

Well, actually it all started in 1977

with this wonderful and very well-known acronym of FCPA, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

So what happened in 1977 is that bribery of a foreign public official became a crime in the US.

Problem is that it became a crime only in the US.

It was not a crime in France, in Germany, in the UK, in all the other OECD countries.

Not only that, but at the time, believe it or not, the bribe was considered a tax deductible

expense in countries like Germany and France. So clearly, this irritated the US companies, and I

would say rightly so. And there was a push which led to the amendment of the F.C.A. in 1989,

and as part of the amendment, there was also in the call for the Congress

the fact that the executive should multilateralize the FCPA.

...