By Amy L. Riella, Craig D. Margolis, Lindsey R. Vaala, and Holly J. Warrington

For the past 30 years, the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which targets conduct perpetrated outside the territorial bounds of the U.S., has served as the international beacon of anti-corruption legislation and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the primary enforcers of anti-bribery crimes occurring globally. In 2010 alone, U.S. authorities assessed more than $1 billion in criminal penalties for violations of the FCPA.

This staggering figure, evidence of U.S. enforcement authorities’ unabated focus on investigating and prosecuting suspected bribery around the world, may not be the most significant or lasting anti-corruption achievement from this past year, however. 2010 is perhaps most remarkable for the emergence of new anti-corruption legislation outside of the United States. The UK government, which only recently endured a litany of bad press as a result of the BAE “on-again off-again” investigation, passed perhaps the most far-reaching anti-corruption legislation to date in the UK Bribery Act 2010 (UKBA). Unlike the FCPA, the UKBA targets commercial bribery as well as bribery of foreign officials, and provides few of the exceptions codified in the FCPA. Similarly, just this year, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) enacted new anti-corruption legislation and is condemning through increased enforcement those paying bribes, rather than penalizing only PRC’s public officials. Read the entire article here.