Welcome to Compliance Hot Spots, and good evening from Washington. Tips, feedback and general thoughts on your practices are always appreciated. I'm C. Ryan Barber—reach me at [email protected] and 202-828-0315, or follow me on Twitter @cryanbarber. Thanks for reading!

SEC's Jay Clayton Flays Foreign Counterparts

Jay Clayton, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, this week offered an earful about what he declared a lack of cooperation globally on the anti-corruption front. Clayton was speaking at the Economic Club of New York. Some highlights from Clayton's remarks:

>> "Corruption is corrosive. We see examples where corruption leads to poverty, exploitation and conflict. Yet, we must face the fact that, in many areas of the world, our work may not be having the desired effect. Why? In significant part, because many other countries, including those that have long had similar offshore anti-corruption laws on their books, do not enforce those laws."

>> "Globally-oriented laws, with no, limited or asymmetric enforcement, can produce individually unfair and collectively suboptimal results. I assure you that this reality is at the front of my mind when I engage with my international counterparts on matters where common, cooperative enforcement strategies are essential, including the recent calls for greater securities law-based regulation of environmental and social issues."

>> "To be clear, I do not intend to change the FCPA enforcement posture of the SEC. We should, however, recognize that we are acting largely alone and other countries are incentivized to play, and I believe some are in fact playing, strategies that take advantage of our laudable efforts."

Microsoft's Lessons, from Brad Smith

Microsoft's Brad Smith (above) is on a media whirl now, promoting his new book and offering his critique of why tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple—but not Microsoft—are facing increasing regulatory pressures now.

Writing at The Atlantic this week, Smith, the president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, talked about some of the lessons the company learned from its own time in the regulatory glare years ago. Smith writes:

>> "We needed to accept the heightened expectations that those in government, the industry, our customers, and society at large had for us."

>> "We needed to get out and listen to what other people had to say, and do more to help solve the technology problems that needed to be solved. That meant building constructive working relationships with more people."

>> "We needed to develop a more principled approach to our work. We needed to maintain an entrepreneurial culture, while also integrating it with principles that we could talk about both internally and externally."

More reading: Microsoft's President Chides Facebook, Urges New Approaches to Combat Weaponization of Tech. "Digital technology has become both a tool and a weapon, and we need to address that head on," Smith said. "And part of addressing it head on starts with really understanding the different ways in which it's either serving humanity or being weaponized." [The Washington Post]

And here at NYT: How Top-Valued Microsoft Has Avoided Tech Backlash. Plus, over a Corporate Counsel: Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith Criticizes Trump's Tactics Against Huawei

Who Got the Work

>> A team from Squire Patton Boggs, including partner Robert Kapla, has renewed its contract with the Embassy of the People's Republic of China to the United States, according to new FARA documents. China has agreed to pay $55,000 monthly for a year, until July 2020. Squire Patton Boggs is representing China with respect to congressional matters. Kapla leads the firm's public policy practice group.

>> Buckley LLP's Margaret Ammons and Preston Burton represented Oceanworks International Corp. in a false-statements case D.C. federal prosecutors filed this week in Washington. The prosecution team, led by Deborah Curtis, deputy chief of the national security section, alleged in an information that Oceanworks deceived U.S. authorities about the transfer of "U.S. Navy Pressurized Rescue Module technical data to China."

>> Huawei Technologies USA Inc., represented by lawyers from Sidley Austin, said Monday the company had dropped a lawsuit in Washington federal district court after the U.S. returned equipment that had been detained for two years. The equipment included computer servers, Ethernet switches and other telecom items. The Sidley team included partners Frank Volpe and Griffith Green, and associate Matthew Letten.

Compliance Reading Corner

US Government Seeks to Disqualify Former Deputy Attorney General as Huawei Lawyer. "Prosecutors argue that a Huawei defense attorney, James Cole, has information that could undermine the government's position in one of its cases because Cole formerly served as US deputy attorney general. Huawei's lawyers referred to Cole as the "lead counsel" for the Chinese company on the case. Lawyers for Huawei called the government's motion to disqualify Cole 'part of a barrage against Huawei.'" [CNN] Bloomberg has more here.

Wilson Sonsini Partner Tarek Helou on the FCPA and the Presumption of Declination. "Companies are looking for certainty. But you are never going to get complete certainty. Let's say a company self discloses, but the CEO was involved and the company and made $200 million in profit. That may not be a case that is appropriate for declination. But what it did was it gave companies more data points to eliminate some of the uncertainty if they self-disclosed."[Corporate Crime Reporter]

U.S. Congressional Probe Finds Possible Lapses in Deutsche Bank Controls. "The congressional inquiry found instances where Deutsche Bank staff in the United States and elsewhere flagged concerns about new Russian clients and transactions involving existing ones, but were ignored by managers, two of the people said. Lawmakers are also examining whether Deutsche Bank facilitated the funneling of illegal funds into the United States as a correspondent bank, where it processes transactions for others, one of the sources said." [Reuters]

Businesses Across the Board Scramble to Comply With California Data-Privacy Law. "Given the difficulty of maintaining a separate protocol for California's 39.6 million residents, many businesses are choosing to apply the changes they make for California to the rest of the country. Some anticipate that the California law will become a kind of de facto national standard, much like the state's standards for auto emissions. Rena Mears, a principal with the law firm DLA Piper, said, '99% of the businesses that we're dealing with are choosing to make the law apply to all their U.S. customers.'" [WSJ]

Notable Moves & Announcements

• Veteran antitrust lawyer Andrew Finch has rejoined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison as a partner after two years in leading roles in the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. Right after he left Paul Weiss in 2017 to join the government, Finch said on an ethics disclosure form that he earned a $3.7 million partnership share at Paul Weiss.

• Paul Murphy, a former King & Spalding white-collar partner now serving as chief of staff to FBI Director Christopher Wray in Washington reported earning more than $4.8 million in income from the firm, a newly released financial disclosure form shows. Read the disclosure here. Murphy took over after the departure of Zack Harmon, who returned Monday to King & Spalding.

• Baker & Hostetler brought on Daniel Pepper, formerly deputy general counsel and deputy privacy officer at Comcast Corp, as a partner in the law firm's privacy and data protection team.

• Also, Baker & Hostetler said it has added a former U.S. Department of Justice official to its antitrust and competition team in New York. Jeffrey Martino, who is joining the firm as a partner, was most recently chief of the DOJ's Antitrust Division for New York. He said turning to a law firm after his nearly 20-year career in government represented a chance to expand his practice.

• King & Spalding said it has hired Alicia O'Brien (at left), who held senior positions in the Department of Justice between 2013 and 2017, as a partner in the firm's government investigations group in Washington. For the past two and a half years, she was a partner in Venable's D.C. office. O'Brien said King & Spalding has a well-earned reputation in the investigations space, and the strength of that practice area attracted her to the firm.

• McGuireWoods has added former prosecutors Kevin Lally as a white-collar partner in Los Angeles. Lally had served in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California since 2001.

• Nasdaq Inc. said Edward Knight, executive vice president and global chief legal and policy officer, will assume the role of vice chairman Oct. 1 and its general counsel for North America has been named chief legal officer. John Zecca will take over the role as Nasdaq's chief legal officer and manage regulatory oversight, legal counsel and compliance. Knight will manage global government relations and continue to serve as an adviser on public policy and litigation.

• Dechert has bolstered to its white-collar crime and trials practice in Philadelphia, bringing on a partner with experience in local government, federal prosecution, private practice and academia. Sozi Tulante (at left), who served as Philadelphia's city solicitor for two years, is Dechert's newest Philadelphia-based partner. Dechert hired former federal prosecutor Andrew Boutros from Seyfarth Shaw to serve as regional chair of the firm's U.S. white-collar practice. Boutros, who will be based in Chicago and Washington, was the national co-chair of Seyfarth's white-collar, internal investigations and false claims team. He had been at the firm since 2015, after leaving the U.S. attorney's office in Chicago.

• Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies has hired three government relations professionals: John Dunn, Darren Collier, and Patrick Carey. Dunn, a managing director at Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies, has previously worked at McGuireWoods, where he led the Illinois government relations group. Collier joins Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies as a principal, arriving from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Carey, who joins Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies as a principal, previously served as a senior vice president at McGuireWoods.

• Miller & Chevalier has added the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's former international affairs chief, Paul Leder, as of counsel in the firm's litigation practice.