In 2015, Malaysia’s former Prime Minister, Najib Razak, was accused of siphoning hundreds of millions of dollars from a government run strategic development company, 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), to his personal bank accounts. The fallout from the 1MDB scandal has been international in scope, most recently resulting in a high-profile indictment and the guilty plea of a senior investment banker in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

The Justice Department’s prosecution of the 1MDB case illustrates how despite early predictions otherwise, Trump administration enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is alive and well. Events seem to have a way of forcing the hand of even the most pro-business administrations. In the early 2000s, the Enron and WorldCom scandals forced the George W. Bush Administration’s Justice Department to overcome any instinctive qualms and vigorously pursue criminal prosecutions of corporate accounting frauds. The high profile, grand scale and sensational nature of some of the alleged misconduct in the 1MDB case seems likewise to have overridden any misgivings the Trump Justice Department may have had about relying on the FCPA in combatting business-related crime.