In the past few years, whistleblowing has been attracting increasing levels of media and regulator attention all over the world and continues to be in the spotlight in 2023. Companies need to deal with new, increasingly strong legal frameworks encouraging people to speak up and offering them greater protection when they do. In this blog post we look at these new developments and consider their implications for compliance programs.
New regulations in many regions
The EU Whistleblowing directive aims to protect whistleblowers – meaning not only employees, but all reporting persons who acquired information in a work-related context – who report breaches of EU law in a number of policy areas such as public procurement, AML, product safety, environmental protection, and public health. Member states were engaged to ‘gold plate’ the provisions of the directive when implementing it, covering a broader base of reportable concerns than the directive itself covered. Many EU member states have now finally transposed the directive (which had to implemented by December 2021) into national law – see most recently for example Italy, Spain and Belgium, all extending the material scope of the directive to more or even all kinds of offences. Other countries such as Germany, where whistleblower protection had not been strictly regulated before, are still struggling with the implementation, leaving companies in the dark as to what the specific requirements might be. At present, it is not yet...
The Trump administration’s fraud prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center is set for arraignment on Thursday afternoon. Ahead of the scheduled court appearance in Alabama, defense lawyers fo...