Good evening from Washington—and welcome to Compliance Hot Spots, our roundup and analysis of regulatory and enforcement trends. Tips, feedback and general thoughts on your practices are always appreciated. I'm C. Ryan Barber in Washington—you can reach me at [email protected] and 202-828-0315, or follow me on Twitter @cryanbarber. Thanks for reading!

Parsing the Walmart FCPA Settlement

Walmart's major FCPA settlement with the U.S. Justice Department and the SEC is still being parsed for what it says—and does not say.

Jones Day advocated for Walmart in the retailer's $282 million FCPA agreementwith federal investigators. Walmart's legal team included Karen Hewitt, partner-in-charge in the Jones Day office in San Diego and a former U.S. attorney.

The settlement shows how Walmart restricted the scope of a compliance monitor, my colleague Sue Reisinger reports.

Laura Perkins, a partner in Hughes Hubbard & Reed's Washington office and co-chair of the anti-corruption and internal investigations practice, said the language of the compliance monitor attachment was unusual. “It's not the usual form language,” Perkins said. “The monitor's mandate is more limited by this agreement; it's restricted to certain countries and certain business lines.”

Perkins also noted the agreement shows Walmart hired the monitor—Louis Freeh, the former FBI director—prior to signing the deal. “That's different. Normally a work plan is determined after the monitor studies what should be looked at using a risk-based approach,” Perkins said.

Jay Jorgensen, formerly global chief ethics and compliance officer at Walmart and now general counsel and chief compliance officer at the South Korean e-commerce company Coupang, said the in-house lawyers and compliance team showed Freeh how they had built a state-of-the-art compliance program to remediate the problem, Reisinger reports.

My colleague Jenna Greene puts a different lens on the settlement: “Looking for the real winner in last week's $282 million settlement between Walmart, the Justice Department and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that resolved charges of overseas bribery? Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd.”

That's the firm behind the $160 million with Walmart resolving a private action alleging that the company covered up suspected corruption in Mexico.

Who Got the Work

>> Lawyers from Baker McKenzie are representing FedEx Corp. in a new lawsuitin Washington against the U.S. Commerce Department's export administration regulations, or EAR. “FedEx Corp., after botching some deliveries for Huawei Technologies Co., filed a lawsuit Monday to stop the U.S. government from requiring the package giant to enforce a crackdown on the Chinese telecommunications-gear maker,” the WSJ reports. The Baker McKenzie team includes Washington partners Maurice Bellan and Kenneth Quinn. Bellan is vice-chair of the firm's North America litigation and government enforcement practice group. Quinn is global chair of the firm's aviation group.

>> A team from Sidley Austin is representing Huawei in a new suit against the U.S. Commerce Department alleging the unlawful seizure of equipment. The team includes partners Frank Volpe and Griffith Green, and associates Matthew Lettenand Ava Guo. Reuters has more here.

>> Lawyers from Sullivan & Cromwell and Covington & Burling represented MUFG Bank, the largest bank in Japan, in resolving a dispute with the New York Department of Financial Services. The bank agreed to pay $33 million to end litigation related to conduct while the bank was regulated by the state, my colleague Dan M. Clark reports. “The settlement allows us to move forward with our simplified regulatory structure in the U.S.,” the bank said in a statement.

>> A team from Holland & Knight has registered to lobby on permitting approval for San Francisco-based Burning Man Project. The team includes Rich Gold, who leads the firm's public policy and regulation group, and Paul Bock, the firm's chief liaison to U.S. Senate Democrats.

Notable Moves & Announcements

• Jeannie Rhee, a former leading prosecutor on Robert Mueller's team, is joining Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in Washington as a white-collar partner. Rhee formerly was a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where she was a Mueller colleague before his appointment as special counsel in 2017. Brad Karp, the Paul Weiss chairman, said in a statement: “Jeannie's years of government service—as a senior Justice Department prosecutor, a member of the Mueller investigative team and an advisor to the U.S. Attorney General and to the White House—will be an invaluable asset to our clients.” Check out my exclusive reporton Rhee's move.

• Meanwhile, Cooley has hired Andrew Goldstein, a former Mueller prosecutor, as a white-collar litigation partner in Washington and New York, my colleague Ryan Lovelace reports. “Working on the Mueller investigation was the privilege of a lifetime,” Goldstein said. “Bob is an extraordinary public servant and he created an environment in our office where our only mission was to do the right thing, to do it for the right reasons, and to do it as quickly as possible, and I am enormously proud of the work that we did.”

• The SEC has named Vanessa Countryman as the agency's secretary. Since 2013, Countryman served as chief counsel in the Division of Economic and Risk Analysis. She earlier clerked for Judge Emilio Garza on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals before practicing law at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

• Former Trump White House lawyer Robert Luther III has joined Jones Day as of counsel in the government regulation practice that Donald McGahn, the former White House counsel, now leads, Bloomberg Law reports. Luther played a leading role in the judicial confirmation process.

• Jacquelyn Kasulis (at left), who led the prosecution of Martin Shkreli, has been picked to head the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn. U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue of the Eastern District told staff that Kasulis, a former litigation associate at Kirkland & Ellis, would take over permanently as chief of the criminal division after serving in an acting capacity for three months.

• Linda Lacewell was confirmed last week as the new superintendent of the state Department of Financial Services, the agency that regulates financial institutions in New York and enforces the state's banking and insurance laws.

• Data compliance firm Odaseva has appointed former investment banker and Big Law attorney Richard Zolezzi as chief legal officer. Zolezzi joins Odaseva's legal department after having served as outside general counsel to the San Francisco-based firm. He was working at Nixon Peabody at the time.

• Brown Rudnick said G. Derek Andreson has joined the firm as a white-collar partner in the Washington office. Anderson joins the firm from Winston & Strawn, where he had been a partner and co-chair of the anti-corruption and FCPA practice.

• Carla Vogel has been named chief compliance officer at private equity firm Sycamore Partners, Compliance Week reports. Vogel arrives from private equity firm EIG Global Energy Partners.

• Troutman Sanders has added white-collar defense partner Ghillaine Reid in New York. Reid arrives from McGuireWoods, where she co-led the broker-dealer industry team.

Compliance Headlines: What I'm Reading

>> Tax Crime Enforcement Unit Relying More on Analytics to Spot Crime. “What's changed—we get a lot of referrals from the Department of Justice, other law enforcement agencies—is taking the data and letting the data tell the story,” Don Fort, chief of the IRS criminal investigations division, said. “Where is the noncompliance based on all of those data sets?” [WSJ]

>> Anti-Money-Laundering Watchdog Calls for Stronger Cryptocurrency Regulations. “And while some crypto companies have invested heavily in compliance, others have a long way to go to build the systems necessary for collecting and managing customer information, said Michael Nonaka, co-chair of the financial services group at Covington & Burling LLP. 'We don't know right now the extent to which the new rule will pose difficulties,' Mr. Nonaka said.” [WSJ]

>> Nordic Banks Prepare to Cut Compliance Staff as Robots Move In. “With labor accounting for roughly three-quarters of the cost of complying with anti-money laundering requirements, Nordic banks are figuring out how to replace people with artificial intelligence, algorithms and automated customer screening. They say a key frustration now is that the authorities are struggling to keep up, after banks plowed huge amounts of money into their risk controls.” [Bloomberg]

>> Trump Administration Pushes to Deregulate With Less Enforcement. “At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created to crack down on unscrupulous small lenders and debt collectors, enforcement is down by 80% from its 2015 peak.” [WSJ]

>> Cryptocurrency Startups Are in Limbo as Regulators Grapple With Risks. “The Securities and Exchange Commission remains concerned that investments based on the technology behind bitcoin would introduce new risks for investors, many of whom could be mom-and-pop traders. The SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority—Wall Street's industry-funded overseer, which is partly responsible for issuing the licenses—are scrutinizing how the startups can serve as gatekeepers, the role brokers traditionally provide.” [WSJ]

>> 10 Years After FCA Amendments, DOJ Using CID Tool in Investigation Belt. “The Department of Justice is using civil investigative demands more and more to investigate False Claims Act allegations. Crowell & Moring attorneys look at a recent court ruling offering hints about their scope and offer tips on how to respond to them.” [Bloomberg Law]

>> Driving in Blockchain's Legal Guardrails: How Ripple's General Counsel Works with Regulators. Veteran financial services general counsel Stuart Alderoty, who took the legal reins at Ripple Labs, spoke with the San Francisco-based general counsel about his relationship with regulators, the state of regulatory clarity worldwide, and his shift from traditional financial services. [Corporate Counsel]