The Entertainment Complex Policy Parliamentary Committee has considered and endorsed the draft Entertainment Complex Bill, B.E. (“Entertainment Complex Bill”), a concept initiated many years ago. The Entertainment Complex Bill aims to facilitate the establishment of entertainment complexes that include casinos. This has been passed to the House of Representatives in March 2024.
Excerpt: On 5 December 2023, the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Code of the Philippines (“PPP Code”) was enacted into law. The PPP Code was enacted to further the State’s policy to provide an enabling environment for the private sector to mobilize its resources to finance, design, construct, operate, and maintain infrastructure or development projects and services. The PPP Code provides for, among others, (i) a unified framework for both national and local PPP projects, (ii) stricter timelines for the evaluation and approval of PPP projects, and (iii) updated thresholds and requirements for approval of national and local PPP projects.
Our popular Annual Compliance Conference, which attracts over 4,000 in-house senior legal and compliance professionals every year from across the world, will be taking place from 30 April – 6 June. We will be delivering our cutting-edge insights and guidance virtually on key global compliance, investigations and ethics trends.
As of 1 January 2024, the Swedish Competition Authority will have increased authority to supervise public procurements. The powers have been adopted in order to make procurement supervision more effective.
Under the new rules, the Swedish Competition Authority may now make decisions on procurement fines without having to apply for a review of the fine in court. This presupposes, however, that the procurement did not begin before 1 January 2024.
The Australian government has, after many years of deliberation, passed the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Combatting Foreign Bribery) Bill 2023 which introduces a new indictable corporate offence of failing to prevent foreign bribery.
This offence will apply where an associate of a company has committed bribery in relation to a foreign public official for the profit or gain of the company. The company will be liable unless it can establish that it has ‘adequate procedures’ in place to prevent the commission of bribery by its associates.
Investigations are an essential tool for ensuring a company’s ethical standards are being followed by employees, business partners, and any others with whom the company interacts. However, investigations are also an essential tool for demonstrating and maintaining strong corporate governance – an integral part of a company’s ESG commitments and strategy. It is also a good time to set yourself some goals and resolutions. To help you on your way, we are pleased to share our top 5 Lunar New Year Resolutions for handling Internal or Government Investigations
Baker McKenzie’s newly updated Global Private M&A Guide is a comprehensive resource examining the impact of new and existing laws affecting deal structuring and private M&A generally in nearly 40 jurisdictions.
The Foreign Extortion Prevention Act (FEPA), enacted on 14 December 2023, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2024, establishes criminal liability for foreign officials soliciting or accepting bribes from specific US entities. FEPA criminalizes corrupt demands by foreign officials and carries potential penalties of up to USD 250,000 fine and 15 years imprisonment. Aligned with international anti-corruption conventions, FEPA reinforces the Biden Administration’s national security priority to combat corruption, and may impact FCPA investigations.
On 10 January 2024, the National Anti-Corruption Authority published some transitional indications on the application of the provisions of the New Public Procurement Code concerning the digitization of direct awarding for an amount of less than EUR 5,000.
This tool is a transitional and supplementary measure that can be adopted in case it is impossible or difficult to use the Certified Digital Procurement Platforms and does not exempt the contracting authority from the duty to transmit the relevant information to the National Public Contracts Database.
On 15 January 2024, Consip S.p.A. and Confindustria Dispositivi Medici (the Italian Association of Medical Device Companies) signed an institutional collaboration agreement aimed at identifying the best procurement opportunities for public administrations in the healthcare sector.