An Update On Sentencing Corporate Bribery

16 May 2016
Commercial Dispute Resolution

Since 1 October 2014, companies guilty of corruption offences are sentenced in accordance with the United Kingdom Sentencing Council guidelines for corporate offenders guilty of fraud, bribery and money laundering. The publication of these guidelines was linked to, and expedited to coincide with, the entry into force of Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPA). The objective was to enable corporate suspects to predict more accurately the financial consequences of their procedural options. The guidelines have now been applied on three occasions, and an analysis of these cases shows that there remains some ambiguity in the English law sentencing regime for corporate bribery.