The U.S. Department of Justice has hired Hui Chen, the former head of compliance for Standard Chartered Bank and ex-assistant general counsel at Pfizer Inc., for its controversial new position of compliance counsel, according to several reports.
The naming of Chen was first revealed by the Global Investigations Review, a subscription service, and then reported by Michael Koehler’s FCPA professor blog last Friday and by Thomas Fox’s FCPA Compliance & Ethics blog on Monday.
While DOJ did not confirm or deny the hiring, public affairs specialist Peter Carr said, “There is a misconception that this person will help determine who to charge and who not to charge. That isn’t the role. “Instead, the person will be assessing the company’s claims about their compliance program – i.e. if a company seeks to claim that it deserves credit for implementing a state of the art compliance program, which is a metric under the Sentencing Guidelines for a break on a fine. The counsel will help subject that to a rigorous analysis, something that a federal prosecutor does not have a lot of expertise in carrying out.”
According to her bio on LinkedIn, Chen has been global head of anti-bribery and corruption at Standard Chartered for the Past year, based in London. Prior to that she served as assistant GC at Pfizer for just over three years in New York, overseeing internal investigations in the Asia Pacific region and supervising regional compliance directors.
