Fcpa Compliance Report

 The concept of privilege in an internal investigation is critical. Two important privileges are the attorney/client privilege and the work product privilege. Unfortunately both are often miss-understood, miss-applied and consequently lost.  One such recent example of the miss-application of the attorney/client privilege was in the trial of former PetroTiger co-Chief Executive Officer (co-CEO) Joel Sigelman has brought the issue of the parameters of the attorney/client privilege yet again. As part of its undercover operation the FBI wired up the then PetroTiger General Counsel (GC), Gregory Weisman, and instructed him to go meet with Sigelman to discuss the payments by the company to the wife of an official of the Columbian state owned energy company Ecopetrol.  Sigelman’s counsel sought to have the video and audio recordings of this meeting suppressed based upon the attorney-client privilege that generally protects open communications between lawyer’s and their clients, where legal advice is sought by the cl