An FCPA allegation forces a hard choice on a board: act on rumor, or first build a record solid enough to act on at all. For an international energy developer confronted with claims that its intermediaries had paid foreign officials, the decision of whether to self-disclose could only be as sound as the facts beneath it — and those facts had to be reconstructed before anything else could happen.
The situation
An international energy developer with upstream and infrastructure operations spanning several jurisdictions received allegations that payments flowing through third-party intermediaries, consultants, and local agents had reached foreign government officials in connection with permitting, licensing, and procurement decisions. The allegations implicated arrangements common to cross-border energy work — agency agreements, success fees, and locally engaged facilitators — but offered no clear line between legitimate business expense and improper payment.
The board and outside counsel faced a decision they could not responsibly make on rumor. Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the company had to determine whether the conduct was real, how far it reached, and whether to pursue a voluntary self-disclosure — a step that turns heavily on the credibility and completeness of the company's own factual record. They needed an investigation that would survive the scrutiny of regulators and a board alike, conducted under privilege, without tipping off the individuals whose conduct was in question.
Our approach
Law & Forensics was engaged under attorney-client privilege through the company's outside investigations counsel, preserving work-product protection over the collection, analysis, and findings. The team approached the matter as a forensic reconstruction: every conclusion had to trace back to source evidence that could withstand challenge.
Defensible digital evidence collection. Working across multiple jurisdictions and data-residency regimes, the team forensically collected and preserved email, instant messaging, mobile communications, and shared-drive content for the custodians at the center of the allegations, maintaining chain of custody so the record would hold up to later review.
ERP and financial-system forensics. Law & Forensics analyzed the company's enterprise resource planning and accounting systems to follow the money — mapping vendor master data, payment approvals, and general-ledger entries against the intermediaries and agents named in the allegations, and surfacing where transactions, descriptions, and authorizations did or did not line up with the company's books and records.
Tracing the payment chain. By correlating financial transactions with the communications and approvals behind them, the team reconstructed how specific payments were initiated, justified, and routed — distinguishing arrangements supported by legitimate documentation from those whose stated purpose was not borne out by the evidence.
Support for interviews and a defensible record. Law & Forensics built the evidentiary foundation that counsel relied on to prepare for and conduct witness interviews, sequencing documents and transactions so questioning could be grounded in the record, and packaging the findings into a forensically sound factual narrative for the board, counsel, and any government-facing presentation.
The impact
The company's board and counsel received a defensible factual record that separated substantiated conduct from allegations the evidence did not support, and that explained — in plain, traceable terms — what the digital and financial evidence showed. That record gave decision-makers a sound basis to evaluate a voluntary self-disclosure on a documented record rather than on speculation, and to govern the matter from a position of knowledge. Because the collection and analysis were performed to a forensic standard and preserved under privilege, the findings held up to scrutiny from counsel, the board, and the demands of a potential regulatory presentation. Law & Forensics' named experts remained available to stand behind the methodology and conclusions wherever the matter ultimately led.
