Combating corruption

The FBI is stepping up efforts against international corruption, creating new squads to search for bribery cases that are rooted overseas but reach to the United States, law enforcement officials said.

The three squads, based in the FBI’s largest field offices, will concentrate on a key priority the justice department set over the past decade. Under the new initiative, roughly 30 agents will be assigned to squads based in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, said Jeffrey Sallet, chief of the FBI’s public corruption and civil rights section, in an interview.

The initiative’s goals are to identify additional violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which makes bribing foreign officials for business a crime, to prosecute cases in US courts and to build on the FBI’s expertise in the area.

FBI dedicates more than two dozen agents to investigate corporate bribery