New International Anti-Corruption Prosecutorial Taskforce Announced

On 20 March 2025, the UK's Serious Fraud Office ("SFO"), France’s Parquet National Financier ("PNF") and the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland ("OAG") announced the creation of the International Anti-Corruption Prosecutorial Taskforce to strengthen efforts to address bribery and corruption. The taskforce is intended to create formal structures to promote the sharing of expertise, insight and strategy and to seize opportunities for operational collaboration to tackle international bribery and corruption. 

The taskforce will create formal structures to allow for increased cooperation at both strategic and operational levels, including a Leaders' Group to allow for the regular exchange of insights and strategy and a Working Group to devise proposals for co-operation on individual cases. The three founding agencies, each with legislative frameworks that allow for enforcement against overseas bribery and corruption, have historically successfully collaborated on multijurisdictional investigations and prosecutions (most notably SFO and PNF have collaborated in investigating and prosecuting Airbus and Rolls Royce).

The founding statement of the taskforce reaffirms a continued commitment to tackling "the threat within the national and international legal frameworks" and indicates an intention to invite "like-minded agencies involved in tackling international bribery and corruption to join the Taskforce", suggesting an intention to widen membership in the future. The announced creation of the taskforce comes, however, as the US has announced suspension of enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ("FCPA") in a major shift in US enforcement against international bribery and corruption (discussed in greater detail in our previous blog post).

Continuing to be a "proactive, authoritative player in the global and domestic justice system", and collaborating with partners globally to share and exchange information and intelligence, is a key element of the SFO's 2029 vision as set out in the SFO's five year strategy (2024-2029) (see our previous post in relation to the SFO's strategy here). 

While the future of FCPA enforcement by the US remains uncertain (at least in the short term), the announced creation of the taskforce indicates a continued commitment to the enforcement of anti-bribery and corruption measures by other enforcement and prosecutorial agencies, both domestically and internationally. It serves as a further statement of intent that the SFO will continue to focus on international issues. Companies with global operations, including those with UK, French or Swiss touchpoints, should continue to ensure that they maintain strong and effective compliance measures which adequately address the bribery and corruption risks that their business faces.