Washington Narrowed, Europe Did Not

Asset recovery in corruption matters has, for two decades, run substantially through one jurisdiction. Not because the misappropriated funds were American, and often not because the conduct was, but because the United States held the combination that makes recovery possible: extraterritorial reach, a civil forfeiture regime that does not require a criminal conviction, dollar-clearing jurisdiction over most international payments, and a standing apparatus staffed to use all three.

That combination has narrowed. Over roughly the same period, three European authorities formalised a joint structure with asset recovery expressly within its scope. Neither development was aimed at the other, and the practical consequence for anyone trying to recover misappropriated assets does not depend on whether they were.

What changed in Washington, in sequence

The order matters, because the developments are frequently compressed into a single narrative that is not accurate.

In February 2025 an executive order paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for 180 days. During the review the Attorney General was to cease initiating new FCPA investigations and enforcement actions absent an individual exception, review existing matters, and issue updated guidelines — with the review period extendable by a further 180 days and future actions requiring the Attorney General's approval.

Separately, on 5 February 2025 the Attorney General issued a memorandum on the elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organisations. Near the end of it, and largely unremarked at the time, came the direction that Task Force KleptoCapture, the Department's Kleptocracy Team and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative were to be disbanded, with attorneys returned to prior posts and resources redirected. The initiative had operated since 2010 within the Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section, and it was the mechanism through which proceeds of foreign corruption were traced, forfeited and in a number of cases returned to the states harmed.

The pause itself did not last. On 9 June 2025 the Deputy Attorney General issued guidelines for FCPA investigations and enforcement, ending it and setting out the criteria by which matters would now be assessed — among them whether the conduct deprived identifiable United States entities of fair opportunity to compete, whether it involved key infrastructure or assets, whether there are strong indicia of corrupt intent attributable to particular individuals, and whether it is associated with the operations of a cartel or transnational criminal organisation. The stated principle is a nexus one: conduct genuinely affecting the United States remains subject to prosecution, and conduct that does not is left to foreign counterparts.

So enforcement did not stop. It was re-scoped, around a test of American interest. That is a different thing, and for a recovery practitioner it is the more consequential of the two, because the archetypal kleptocracy matter — funds taken from a foreign treasury, laundered through several jurisdictions, invested in real property — frequently has no American victim who can be identified in the way the criteria contemplate.

What formed in Europe

On 20 March 2025 the Serious Fraud Office, the Parquet National Financier and the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland announced an International Anti-Corruption Prosecutorial Taskforce, with a Leaders' Group for regular exchange and a Working Group to develop cooperation proposals, covering transnational corruption, money laundering, foreign bribery and asset recovery, and with a stated intention to invite other agencies.

The temptation is to read this as a response, and the SFO's Director stated publicly that it is in no way a reaction to the FCPA position. That should be taken at face value, and the analysis does not require otherwise. These three authorities had collaborated for years on multi-jurisdictional matters; what is new is a standing structure rather than case-by-case cooperation, which changes the cost of coordinating the next matter rather than the willingness to.

What matters practically is neither institution's motive but the resulting map. A recovery strategy that would once have been built around a United States forfeiture action, with parallel proceedings elsewhere in support, now more often runs the other way: the primary process sits in London, Paris or Bern, and the American element, where it exists at all, is evidentiary rather than dispositive.

The reach did not go anywhere

It would be a mistake to read any of this as American jurisdiction receding, and the distinction matters for how a matter is planned.

The structural sources of that jurisdiction are untouched. Dollar-clearing still routes an enormous share of international payments through correspondent accounts in New York, and the presence of a dollar leg still supplies a jurisdictional hook. Sanctions authorities, money-laundering statutes and the reporting obligations that generate the underlying records all remain in place, as does the enforcement effort against cartels and transnational criminal organisations, which the June guidelines expressly carve out of their own scope.

What changed is not capability but the appetite for a category of case. A foreign-official bribery matter with no identifiable American commercial victim now has to compete for attention against criteria that were written to prioritise something else. The reach that would have supported the case is still there; the institutional will to expend it on that particular shape of case is what moved, and an adviser who describes the change as a loss of jurisdiction is describing the wrong variable to a client who will later be surprised by a subpoena.

What this does not change

One thing survives all of it, and it is the part that determines outcomes.

Tracing is not recovery. Establishing where an asset went is an evidential exercise; getting it back requires a court with jurisdiction, a cause of action, a defendant capable of being served and a forum willing to enforce. Those four gates are held by other people, and none of them is opened by the quality of the tracing work. What the shift above changes is which jurisdiction's gates you are queuing at, and the procedural requirements at each are different — different limitation regimes, different standards for freezing relief, different rules on whether proceedings can run without a conviction.

That last point deserves emphasis, because it is the practical substance of the change rather than its politics. Civil forfeiture without a criminal conviction is not uniformly available, and a strategy designed around its availability does not transplant cleanly into a jurisdiction that does not offer it. Work that was fit for one forum is not automatically fit for the next.

Nothing above is a view on whether the American reprioritisation is correct, and none of it is a comment on any particular investigation or prosecution. The observation is narrower and it is directed at sequencing: recovery strategy is built on assumptions about which forum will carry the primary process, those assumptions were stable for two decades, and they moved inside a six-week period in early 2025. A matter opened on the old assumption and still running on it is being run against a map that has been redrawn.