Leniency agreements signed by the Brazilian Office of the Comptroller General in coordination with United States authorities and measures to avoid overlapping sanctions
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36428/revistadacgu.v18i33.777Keywords:
leniency agreements, legal persons, sanctions, coordination, proportionalityAbstract
Since 2017, the Office of the Comptroller General (CGU) and the Attorney General’s Office (AGU)
of Brazil have signed leniency agreements. In 2019, these institutions signed the first coordinated agreement with U.S. authorities to sanction companies for the same corruption offences. Since then, other agreements have been concluded in coordination. The liability of legal persons for the offence of bribery of foreign public officials is established in Brazil under Law No. 12,846/2013, while in the United States it is under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Both instruments criminalize transnational bribery, which grants both
countries jurisdiction to sanction acts committed outside their territories. The possibility of penalties being imposed by authorities in more than one country has been criticized due to the risk of cumulative sanctions. This is also the case of leniency agreements signed by the CGU in coordination with U.S. authorities. This article aims to evaluate cases of coordinated agreements from the perspective of the sanctions imposed by each country, in order to assess if measures are in place to avoid overlapping sanctions and, if so, whether they are sufficient. Based on a review of the literature and an analysis of administrative case law in eight cases coordinated with the participation of the CGU, we will identify a procedure of crediting values to mitigate the
accumulation of sanctions. The data show that the mitigation of overlapping sanctions is partial: on average, approximately 70% of the amount paid under agreements signed with the CGU and the AGU is compensated in the agreements with the U.S. authorities, with significant variations depending on the specific case. Until recently, there were no Brazilian regulations addressing reciprocity - crediting of amounts paid abroad. However, regulation published by the CGU and the AGU, at the end of 2025, represents progress since it provides
criteria and mechanisms to avoid bis in idem in multijurisdictional negotiations. Although the current
measures mitigate the problem, they do not fully eliminate the possibility of cumulative sanctions, making further procedural harmonization necessary to strengthen legal certainty and incentivize cooperation by legal persons.
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