Bribery Act 2010

Overview

The Bribery Act 2010 reforms the criminal law of bribery and provides a new consolidated scheme of bribery offences to cover bribery both in the United Kingdom (UK) and abroad. Generally, bribery is defined as giving someone a financial or other advantage, to encourage them to perform their functions or activities improperly, or to reward them for having already done so. This would cover trying to influence a decision-maker, by giving them some kind of extra benefit, rather than sticking to a legitimate tender process.

This Act replaces the common law bribery offences and repeals the legislation relating to the Prevention of Corruption Acts 1889 to 1916. It creates two general bribery offences:

• This deals with the offering, promising or giving of an advantage. In other words, offences relating to bribing a person
• This deals with requesting, agreeing to receive or accepting an advantage. In simple terms, offences of being bribed

The Act also creates a discrete offence of bribery of a foreign public official, and another new offence where a commercial organisation fails to prevent bribery. The other main provisions of the Act include:

• The Attorney General’s consent to prosecute a bribery offence is no longer required. It now just needs the consent of the Director of the relevant prosecuting authority
• UK residents, UK nationals and UK corporate bodies committing bribery offences abroad may be prosecuted
• If it had been necessary for a bribery offence to have been committed by the intelligence services or armed formed forces on active duty, this would be a defence to prosecution
• There is a maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment for all the offences, except the offence relating to commercial organisations, which carries an unlimited fine