Compensation for overseas victims of corruption
Cristián Francos was quoted in an article discussing the frameworks used in many Western countries to provide compensation to overseas victims of economic crime.
[A] fundamental issue with these international agreements is that the UN and OECD lack powers of enforcement. "I am an absolute defender and supporter of international agreements," says Cristián Francos, Co-Chair of the IBA Business Crime Committee and a partner at Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss, based in the US, "but the problem with them is that you don’t have an organism that can enforce those agreements, so you depend on countries to incorporate those agreements and act in accord with them."
[Some] jurisdictions, such as the US, consider the states of victim countries to be potential co-conspirators in the corruption. This results in a hesitancy to provide compensation. "You may recover billions of dollars, but in order to justly compensate victims, you may run into the problem of, well, if I return this to the state, am I returning this to the main corrupt actor?" says Francos.