Canada

The trade landscape is changing for many Canadian companies. Canada is involved in the renegotiation of NAFTA.  The Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement comes into effect on August 1, 2017.  The Canada-EU CETA enters into provisional effect on September 21, 2017.  The Government of Canada is updating export controls and economic sanctions laws and Global

Ontario’s highest court, the Ontario Court of Appeal, issued a decision on July 6, 2017 in R. v. Karigar, which takes enforcement of foreign bribery to another level in Canada.  In 2013, Mr. Karigar was convicted of offering to bribe a foreign public official contrary to paragraph 3(1)(b) of the Corruption of Foreign Public

In the span of the last 18 months, the topic of corporate compliance programs has gotten considerable attention from the Department of Justice  (“DOJ”) and now finally, DOJ has published significant details about how it is likely to measure the sufficiency of any company’s compliance program.

First, some background.  In September 2015, the Yates memo

Gavel and Scales of JusticeOn February 10, 2017, three former executives of SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. saw Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act (Canada) charges withdrawn in the Ontario Superior Court. Former SNC vice-president of energy and infrastructure Kevin Wallace, former SNC vice-president of international development Ramesh Shah, and Bangladeshi-Canadian businessman Zulfiquar Ali Bhuiyana were charged with bribing an official

iStock_000019169483XSmallCanadian companies are required to comply with Canada’s economic sanctions laws – and it is not an easy task. Currently, Canada imposes multi-lateral economic sanctions pursuant to the United Nations Act against 16 countries (Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, North Korea, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South

Originally published by the Journal of Commerce – November 2016

Fans of ESPN’s College Game Day© will recognize this tag line from the reaction of Lee Corso when he disagrees with others when panelists predict winners of selected college football games. If you prefer a different sports metaphor, there is Aaron Rodger’s 2014 now famous

Just in the last week, both the European Parliament and the European Data Protection Supervisor (“EDPS”) published findings holding the currently proposed EU-US Privacy Shield to be seriously deficient, and calling for further negotiations to deal with those “holes”.

On May 26, 2016, the European Parliament passed a resolution, see EU Parliament Resolution, basically

On May 11, 2016, President Obama signed into law the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2016 (DTSA) which brought with it a new era of accountability and expediency in protecting employers’ intellectual property. Whether proprietary lines of code in a software program, the secret recipe for fried chicken or highly-valued customer lists, “trade secrets” provide

Originally published by the Journal of Commerce in May 2016

Only three (3) years ago, when Tom Winkowski was Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) and John Morton the Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”), both of them acknowledged publicly how their respective agencies had lost such significant depths of knowledge and

Corporate compliance programs come in all shapes and sizes and apply whether your company is privately owned or publicly traded. These internal controls take the form of accounting and audit procedures, import-export/regulatory policies, employment guidelines, ethics/anti-corruption initiatives and so on. The intent of any compliance program is to ensure that employees know what is expected