Eye on Economic Crime: UK, Swiss and French International Anti-Corruption Taskforce

Summary

On 20 March 2025, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (“SFO”), France’s Parquet National Financier (“PNF”) and the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (“OAG”) affirmed their shared commitment to tackling national and international bribery and corruption.

The institutions have founded a new taskforce to strengthen collaboration and existing operational relationships between these countries. This venture will encourage the sharing of insight, expertise and best practices to improve cross-border strategies and investigations.

The group plans to “pool our resources when we have the right investigation or prosecution to pursue,” Nick Ephgrave, the SFO’s director said in an interview.

All three countries already have their own wide-reaching anti-bribery legislation which grants jurisdiction to prosecute criminal conduct occurring overseas, if there is a link to the prosecuting country. The taskforce is intended to streamline this process and utilise intelligence sourced by each institution to the greatest extent possible. In so doing, the taskforce seeks to build on past collaboration efforts, which were already deployed in high profile bribery cases.

The participants have said that this taskforce has been at least a year in the making but it has not gone unnoticed that this announcement comes just over a month after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Pausing Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Enforcement to Further American Economic and National Security." This order paused bribery enforcement overseas to shift focus to drug cartel activity instead.

The US has previously been at the forefront of international bribery enforcement with powerful tools at its disposal. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act permits US prosecutors to assert jurisdiction simply because a suspicious transaction was conducted in US dollars. Most notably, the US has been known to incentivise whistleblowers both domestically and internationally.

Commentary from a UK perspective

Ephgrave has been saying for some time that he wants to offer rewards to whistleblowers in the UK, inspired by the US approach. He first suggested this in a speech on 13 February 2024, and has referred to the idea in multiple interviews since. See, for example, reporting from The Guardian, Whistleblowers Blog, The Telegraph, and Global Investigations Review.

Ephgrave has proposed a system whereby informants can receive a portion of the proceeds that the SFO manages to win back from a case.

Ephgrave’s comments are particularly interesting against the backdrop of the introduction of the new ‘failure to prevent fraud’ offence introduced by the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, which is intended to apply to any company which fails to show it had in place reasonable fraud prevention procedures such that an employee (i) committed fraud as defined by UK law or (ii) defrauded victims based in the UK, regardless of whether the company or its employees are domiciled in the UK. See our previous briefings on the new ‘failure to prevent fraud’ offence here and here.

Companies will need to consider, as part of their fraud prevention framework, whether a whistleblower incentive scheme (if introduced) will require some extra steps or considerations that may otherwise not have been necessary. Guidance from the new taskforce would be welcomed by practitioners. The Mayer Brown team is closely monitoring these developments and their potential implications, and is fully equipped to advise companies in all sectors.

Commentary from a French perspective

A decade after its creation, the PNF has demonstrated its crucial role in the fight against national and transnational corruption, with at least 129 convictions for probity offences (i.e., including corruption and influence peddling), and the conclusion of 20 judicial public interest agreements (“CJIP”), equivalent to UK deferred prosecution agreements, often in coordination with the French Anti-Corruption Agency (“AFA”).

France has to date refused to consider rewarding whistleblowers, with protection being granted only where whistleblowers act without direct financial counterparty (Law n° 2016-1691, “Sapin II”, Art. 6). The PNF and AFA nonetheless strongly encourage voluntary self-disclosures, with such disclosures being treated as mitigating factors when setting the amount of fines under CJIP.

While the establishment of the PNF and of the CJIP have contributed to the international recognition and credibility of France’s anti-corruption framework, the insufficient allocation of human and financial resources to the PNF, despite the growing number and complexity of cases investigated and their international dimension, has raised concerns, including by the head of the PNF himself, and contributed to the degradation of France’s scoring in the latest Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index .

The establishment of an international taskforce is therefore a welcome step as it will strengthen the PNF’s position on the international scene, reinforce cross-border cooperation, allow the PNF to combat corruption more efficiently and could, to some extent, alleviate its lack of resources.

In parallel, the EU is pushing for the adoption of stronger rules to fight corruption, with (i) a proposed directive currently in trilogue phase that will provide for both repressive and preventive measures and facilitate cross-border cooperation within the EU at large, and (ii) efforts to promote greater harmonization of compliance efforts within the private sector, through the EU network against corruption. The Mayer Brown team is also actively monitoring these developments that will impact the anti-corruption standards applicable to French and EU companies.