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No More 'Free Pass' for Foreign Citizens

By David J. Laing

When a US company settles a criminal antitrust case by pleading guilty, the Justice Department (DOJ) now usually requires that at least one executive receive a prison sentence. But what about foreign companies? In the past, DOJ often prosecuted foreign companies, but not foreign executives. Prosecution of foreign executives raised questions of diplomacy, since the United States until recently was the only nation that made antitrust violations a crime. Then there was the practical problem of how to arrest a foreign citizen overseas. Besides, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) policy was to deport non-violent, non-US citizens instead of housing them at US taxpayers' expense, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) barred foreign felons from the country.

The practical result of these collective DOJ policies was that a foreign citizen could conspire in price fixing that harmed the U.S. economy without risk of imprisonment. This began to change in 1994 when a Canadian who participated in a North American price fixing conspiracy went to jail in the US. Rumor has it that the BOP at first refused to admit the Canadian when he turned himself in at the United States Prison at Lewisburg, PA, so he spent his first night of “incarceration” at a local Holiday Inn, for which he received credit in his sentence.

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