Glencore (an Anglo–Swiss mining company with headquarters in Baar, Switzerland and ADRs traded on several exchanges) has been under U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act since mid-2018. Earlier this year, Glencore disclosed that it expects to resolve U.S., U.K., and Brazilian investigations in 2022 and that it reserved USD 1.5 billion “representing the Company’s current best estimate of the costs to resolve these investigations.” It can be assumed the factors relevant to the resolution of these matters will be Glencore’s remedial measures and compliance enhancements.

Relevant to this issue, Glencore has released a few days ago its first ever Ethics and Compliance Report which provides “a detailed overview of Glencore’s Ethics and Compliance Programme, including a summary of [the] approach, compliance structure, and the various systems and processes that [Glencore] implement[s] to support [its] programme and promote an ethical culture.”

This document may be of considerable interest to compliance officers as it is published by a company under intense FCPA (and related) scrutiny that no doubt recognizes that the information in the Report will be relevant to the pending resolutions. In the process of reviewing the 74 page document, the reader will also encounter several micro-details such as how many compliance professionals the company has, how many languages the Code of Conduct was translated into, how many compliance posters were put in Canadian offices compared to Australian offices, how many Kazakhstan employees were invited to an online event with the CEO, and how many third parties the company actively monitors as an article on the FCPA Blog emphasizes.