LexisNexis prepares for UK Bribery Act
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

Item

As well as developing new products for legal professionals, as reported by Tim Buckley Owen in March, LexisNexis has been busy working on solutions for legal information professionals involved in due diligence. At the end of last week, LexisNexis UK announced a new release of the Due Diligence Solution product, part of the company’s Risk & Compliance Solutions platform. 

The launch of Due Diligence Solution is timed to coincide with the new and delayed UK Bribery Act 2010, which, according to a PWC white paper, "represents the biggest changes to UK laws in this area of business and commerce for many generations”. The new Act, which is the UK counterpart to the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, brings the UK in line with OECD requirements and puts the onus on companies to show they have put procedures in place to prevent corrupt practices not only internally, but also by third parties such as contractors and suppliers, who may be operating abroad.

In fact, according to an article in the Guardian, the UK Bribery Act goes further than its US equivalent by including the bribery of private citizens as well as public officials in its list of offences.

So, compliance officers and information professionals servicing compliance teams will have to be even more thorough in their due diligence checks and will need to ensure that their existing anti money laundering procedures and information tools are adequate enough to cover third party agents. The LexisNexis Due Diligence solution allows users to search for information on sanctions, politically exposed persons (PEPs) and news across multiple databases. For compliance purposes, all searches conducted on the database are date and time stamped to enable companies to prove that checks were carried out.

With this new Bribery Act, information and compliance professionals are going to have their work cut out. We can expect other vendors to enter the due diligence sector with similar products, which no doubt the LiveWire team will be reviewing. 

« Blog