On April 14, 2013, Frederic Pierucci, an executive of Alstom, a French power and transportation conglomerate, was arrested by the FBI when his plane arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. He was charged with bribing Indonesian officials to win a power plant contract.
But the indictment was not a simple anti-corruption probe, as Pierucci, then president of the French power titan's boiler subsidiary, argued in his book The American Trap, where he unveiled how theU.S.law enforcement departments used its anti-corruption laws to pursue anti-corruption investigations into non-U.S. companies worldwide.
The “Americatrap” was set for non-U.S. countries, enterprises and individuals, Pierucci said, adding that any international company targeted by theU.S.justice department could not escape the intervention of theU.S.anti-corruption laws.
Step by step, theU.S.government is taking control of the core industries and highly competitive companies of other countries.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) came into force in 1977. It was meant to punish American companies involved in overseas bribery. But the Americans re-adopted the act and gave it extraterritoriality.