Business crimes & compliance

Our firm focuses in providing comprehensive legal assistance to foreign legal entities conducting business in Greece. More than 90% of our clientele is foreign based. As a result our firm has since many a year been exposed to issues related to compliance and has assisted many companies with respect to bribery, transparency and compliance issues involving their Greek subsidiaries or operations.  Likewise, our firm has often advised US clients on FCPA related audits.

Zepos & Yannopoulos has significant expertise in all related legal areas comprising compliance and anti-corruption audits for foreign clients and extensive experience and familiarity with similar internal audits and compliance projects. In this respect, on several instances, we had the opportunity-especially in the recent past- to conduct compliance and anti-corruption reviews and produce reports with proposed self-cleaning measures for clients. Our involvement mainly covered the areas of anti-corruption regulation, public procurement laws, tax and accounting compliance, corporate law as well as criminal aspects of all of the above.

By way of example, recent assignments include advising the following:

• a major international group on a particular type of cross-border fraud, based on the VAT system which is known as VAT missing trader intra-community fraud (MTIC fraud). VAT intra-community missing trader fraud is a systematic criminal attack on the VAT system, which has been detected in many EU Member States including Greece. Our work on the matter was to assess Greek implications (tax, administrative, labour, corporate, criminal and other) arising from the involvement in such fraud of high ranked employees of our client and propose appropriate actions to comply with the applicable framework, including the handling of disclosures and collaboration with the Greek authorities.
• a major european automobile industry on white-collar criminal and tender-debarment risks and on the obligations of disclosure to the Greek criminal authorities and public-procurement agencies.
• a major US corporation on the compliance of various policies and procedures implemented by the Greek subsidiary ranging from employment, commercial matters, M&A, anti-corruption, etc.
• US defence industries on issues related to FCPA ramifications stemming from public procurement contracts.
• a major international industrial and telecom company on tender-debarment risks and on the methods to achieve compliance for its future projects in Greece.
• a major international IT company regarding its participation to a high-volume public contract in Greece (following a tender) and irregularities revealed through internal audits of the group; contributing to the identification of the legal issues and to the planning and implementation of the necessary self-cleaning measures in line with Greek law.
• significant US and non-US defence manufacturers on legal issues connected with their domestic compliance with respect to the use of commercial sales representatives and/or consultants while bidding for Greek public tenders or contracting with the Greek State.

Zepos & Yannopoulos is the exclusive correspondent of TRACE International, (Transparent Agents and Contracting Agencies, www.traceinternational.org ), a non-profit membership association that specializes in anti-bribery due diligence reviews and compliance training for international commercial intermediaries. Our active participation in TRACE helps us follow developments in this field internationally and deepen our relevant knowledge and understanding of related matters.

In a jurisdiction known to be suffering from lack of transparency, Zepos & Yannopoulos has long been recognized as a firm founded on ethics, independence, and non partisanship.

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