Compliance Corner: Spain Goes In OECD's Naughty Corner

Editorial Staff

20 December 2022

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has fired a warning shot at Spain for not doing enough to thwart bribery and corruption. This is the second time the Paris-based organisation has scolded a European nation on this subject in a matter of days. It issued a warning to Finland last week.

The OECD said that Spain has only successfully convicted two people in a single foreign bribery case and has failed to convict a single company since the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention took force two years ago.

“Spain continues to close cases prematurely. Prosecutors have insufficient time to conduct their investigations and face challenges in deploying adequate investigative measures. Spain needs to address these issues urgently and improve detection by regulating voluntary self-disclosure and protecting whistleblowers,” the organisation said.

In its statement yesterday, the OECD said that a working group has completed a “phase 4” evaluation of how Spain is implementing the Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions and related instruments.

The OECD said its report “expresses concerns about the restrictive interpretation of the foreign bribery offence by Spanish judges, the exceedingly short statute of limitations applicable to proceedings against legal persons, and how corporate criminal liability is triggered in practice.”

The working group has recommended that Madrid urgently adopts its draft law on whistleblower protection and ensures that specialised prosecutors have enough time to investigate cases in which the threshold for opening a probe allows effective checks and prosecutions to take place.

The statute of limitations for pursuing a foreign bribery case against legal persons should fit that which applies to individuals. The OECD said that Spain should also consider introducing a system of non-trial resolutions for foreign bribery cases which follow the principles of due process, transparency and accountability.

The OECD added that the report also mentioned several “positive developments and good practices,” such as the rise in foreign bribery probes.