The impact of compliance in the M&A transactions: risk or opportunity?

We will study the growing need to establish rigorous anti-corruption protocols to ensure compliance with policies and procedures that comport to U.S., British, European and global standards. The growth of globalization is imposing to any company doing business in different jurisdictions the need to rigorously police the entire organization to mitigate the risk of corrupt practices even in locations where corruption is an accepted reality of doing business.

The commission will consider the challenges that companies face in this area in three ways:
(i) How internal compliance programs and internal investigations together with a clearly communicated “tone at the top,” where deeds, and not just words, demonstrate an institutional commitment to the highest ethical standards,
(ii) how an organization should conduct due diligence on target acquisitions to ensure that there is a shared vision of corporate compliance and to ascertain where there is risk to the combined organization from the acquisition or business combination and
(iii) methods to mitigate risk or historical issues regarding compliance that are identified either internally or within the target.