U.K. Extraditions Facilitate Corruption Prosecutions

Hardly a day passes without report of a development in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which makes it unlawful to “offer…promise to give, or authoriz[e]…the giving of anything of value to” foreign officials to obtain or retain business.¹ Recently, a court in the United Kingdom approved the United States’ request to extradite Jeffrey Tesler, a 61-year-old U.K. solicitor, to face FCPA charges for allegedly paying bribes to a Nigerian-government controlled company to obtain contracts to build a liquefied natural gas plant on Nigeria’s Bonny Island.² Less than a month later, on April 20, 2010, the same court approved a request to extradite Tesler’s co-defendant, Wojciech Chodan, a 72-year-old retired U.K. sales executive, to face charges for his alleged efforts in coordinating the bribes and ensuring they were paid.³

Extraditions facilitate FCPA enforcement against foreign nationals, allowing the DOJ to exercise the FCPA’s broad scope and the DOJ’s broad interpretation of the act’s provisions.⁴ Whether or not these recent decisions portend a general increased willingness to extradite foreign nationals to the United States to face FCPA charges remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, it appears likely that the growing number of successful extradition rulings from U.K. courts may make some foreign nationals pause.