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Abstract

This thesis examines the February 2021 dual enforcement action against Colas Djibouti SARL - a Deferred Prosecution Agreement resolving criminal wire fraud charges and a parallel civil settlement under the False Claims Act - arising from the supply of substandard concrete and falsified laboratory results on United States Navy construction contracts at Camp Lemonnier, Republic of Djibouti. It argues that the resolution is at once a doctrinal success and a structural failure. Doctrinally, the case illustrates the expanding reach of U.S. federal enforcement over foreign subsidiaries operating in high-risk jurisdictions: the wire fraud statutes supplied jurisdiction where territorial principles would have failed, the implied-certification theory endorsed in Universal Health Services v. Escobar recharacterized noncompliant performance as a false claim on the Treasury, and the coordinated criminal and civil tracks operated as a single calibrated instrument. Structurally, however, the reform the action produced addressed the behaviors that generated the fraud without dismantling the organizational conditions that allowed them to persist. Applying Ashforth and Anand's framework on the normalization of corruption, the thesis measures the post-DPA compliance architecture against both the DOJ's Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs and the root causes identified in the factual record, and finds that a program may satisfy the ECCP's procedural benchmarks while leaving the institutional dynamics that produced the misconduct intact. That disjunction -  between procedural adequacy and substantive sufficiency -  is the analysis's central contribution.

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