Pay to Walk: The Balt SAS Declination and the Price of Corporate Accountability

On March 10, 2026, the Department of Justice released its first unified, department-wide Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy — replacing the prior patchwork of district-specific frameworks with a single set of rules governing how federal prosecutors evaluate corporate misconduct across every criminal matter except antitrust. Nine days later, that policy got its first test.

The result: Balt SAS, a French medical device company, walked away from six years of documented bribery without a federal criminal conviction, without a criminal fine beyond what it had already profited, and without an independent compliance monitor. The company disgorged approximately $1.2 million — the proceeds of the scheme — accepted responsibility, and entered a compliance program overseen by French authorities. On the same day the declination letter issued, two individuals who participated in that same scheme were federally indicted on charges that carry potential prison sentences of years per count.

This piece does not argue that the Balt outcome was wrong under the terms of the policy as written. It was not. The company appears to have done precisely what the framework requires. The question is what the framework itself reveals about how accountability is structured when the defendant is an institution versus when the defendant is a person.

What Balt Did and How the Policy Applied

The facts are not in dispute. Between approximately 2017 and 2023, Balt paid roughly $602,000 in bribes to a physician at a state-owned hospital in France. The payments were routed through a third-party consultant in Belgium and were intended to influence purchasing decisions for medical devices, including embolization coils. Employees and agents allegedly took steps to conceal the payments, including the use of false invoices and purported “bonus” payments.

Six years. Third-party routing. Falsified documentation. Deliberate concealment to avoid detection. This is not the profile of an accidental violation or a rogue act that slipped past a functioning compliance system. It is a sustained, structured scheme.

DOJ found that Balt qualified for a declination under Part I of the CEP because it made a timely and voluntary self-disclosure to the Fraud Section, fully and proactively cooperated with the government’s investigation, timely and appropriately remediated, and lacked aggravating circumstances that “when weighed against Balt’s voluntary self-disclosure, cooperation, and remediation, would warrant a disposition other than a resolution under Part I of the CEP.”

What tipped the balance: Balt disclosed while its internal investigation was still ongoing — a detail DOJ specifically credited. The company disclosed while that investigation was still in progress. DOJ continues to reward companies that come forward early, even before all facts are fully developed. The company then provided what the DOJ described as full and proactive cooperation, assisted in identifying individuals, terminated the business relationships connected to the misconduct, and enhanced its compliance infrastructure.

Balt avoided penalties and monitorships that are often required even in non-prosecution agreements or deferred prosecution agreements. The result — designated a “Part I” declination, the most favorable resolution the new policy offers — came with disgorgement of approximately $1.2 million, ongoing cooperation obligations, and the compliance program being administered by French authorities under the parallel French resolution.

Disgorgement Is Not a Punishment

The DOJ and its defenders consistently describe the Balt outcome as proof that “a declination is not a free pass.” That framing deserves scrutiny, because what Balt paid is not a punishment in any traditional legal sense.

Disgorgement is the surrender of ill-gotten gains. It is designed to ensure that the wrongdoer does not profit from the misconduct — not to impose a penalty beyond the profit itself. A declination is not a free pass. Companies must still give up ill-gotten gains and compensate for the benefits derived from wrongdoing. That is accurate as a description of what the policy requires. It is incomplete as an account of what accountability means.

If a company runs a six-year bribery scheme, profits approximately $1.2 million, and is then required to return approximately $1.2 million, the financial consequence of the entire scheme is, net of legal fees and compliance investment, approximately zero. There is no criminal fine on top of disgorgement under Part I. There is no admission in a federal court of record. There is no conviction that follows the company’s principals into future transactions, licensing applications, or government contracting eligibility. The reputational cost is real, but it is not legally imposed — it is market-driven, and it dissipates.

Critics of the declination-with-disgorgement mechanism have been making this point for years. A law review article published in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform identified the core tension directly: to the extent that these arrangements allow a corporation to “buy” a declination with the disgorgement amount representing the cost of doing international business, the mechanism may function less as accountability and more as a pricing schedule for misconduct.

The Individual Side of the Same Transaction

On March 4, 2026 — weeks before the declination letter issued — a federal grand jury indicted David Ferrera, a senior executive of Balt USA LLC, and Marc Tilman, a Belgium-based consultant, in connection with the bribery scheme at issue in the Balt declination, charging them with conspiracy to violate the FCPA, substantive FCPA violations, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and money laundering.

The declination letter is explicit: it does not protect any individual, regardless of their affiliation with Balt. The company’s cooperation — including its identification of the individuals involved — directly facilitated those indictments. That is not incidental to the policy. It is the policy’s design. On the same day the company received a declination, two individuals were indicted.

What the individuals face is not equivalent to what the company faced. The maximum exposure on FCPA anti-bribery violations for individuals is five years per count. Money laundering charges carry substantially higher exposure. There is no Corporate Enforcement Policy for people. There is no framework by which Ferrera or Tilman can self-disclose, fully cooperate, remediate, and receive a declination with disgorgement. The resolution mechanism does not exist for them in the form that existed for the institution that employed them.

Recent FCPA sentencing history makes the comparison concrete. Tim Leissner, the former Goldman Sachs executive whose cooperation with the DOJ was described as substantial — the government’s own sentencing letter called it help with “one of the largest financial crimes in history” — received two years in prison. The sentencing judge described his conduct as “brazen and audacious.” Two years, with cooperation. The former Finance Minister of Mozambique received 102 months. Roger Ng, convicted in the same 1MDB case as Leissner, received ten years.

These cases involve different facts and different degrees of culpability. But they establish a range. Individuals who participate in foreign bribery schemes face sentences measured in years, sometimes decades, even when they cooperate. The company that organized, funded, and benefited from the scheme faces disgorgement and a compliance program.

What the Policy Is Designed to Do — and What It Cannot Do

The honest accounting of the Corporate Enforcement Policy requires acknowledging what it is actually for. It is not designed to punish corporations the way criminal prosecution punishes individuals. It is designed to create incentives for self-disclosure that would otherwise not exist, surface misconduct that would otherwise stay buried, and generate the cooperation necessary to prosecute individuals who would otherwise never be identified.

The new CEP closely resembles the Criminal Division’s prior CEP and maintains the familiar structure of DOJ’s voluntary disclosure guidance: companies that voluntarily disclose misconduct, fully cooperate, and timely remediate will be eligible for a declination, while companies that narrowly miss those requirements may still receive significant reductions in penalties and other benefits.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche described the policy’s purpose as creating incentives for companies to come forward so that individual wrongdoers can be held accountable. The Balt case confirms that logic. The company’s cooperation produced two federal indictments. Without the voluntary self-disclosure framework, those indictments may never have materialized. Ferrera and Tilman may have remained unknown to federal investigators.

This is the strongest version of the policy’s defense, and it is not wrong. The mechanism works as designed: companies trade cooperation for leniency, and individuals bear the criminal consequences the company avoided. The question is not whether that trade is occurring. It is whether the trade is producing what we actually mean when we say accountability.

What This Means for the Accountability Record

The Balt SAS case is not an outlier. It is the intended first use of a new framework that DOJ released and then immediately demonstrated — nine days from policy to first resolution. That speed was not coincidence. It was a signal to corporate counsel everywhere that the framework is live, that it works as described, and that companies which act quickly can achieve outcomes the policy promises.

In 2025, the year before the new department-wide CEP, DOJ saw only two FCPA corporate resolutions — a significant reduction from the nine in 2024 and eight in 2023. Whether the new framework accelerates corporate resolutions remains to be seen. What is already clear is that it creates a more formalized, more predictable path to avoiding prosecution for institutions that can navigate the process.

For individuals connected to those institutions, the path runs in a different direction. Ferrera and Tilman will move through a federal criminal prosecution with no equivalent framework available. If convicted, their sentences will be measured against the same guidelines that applied to Tim Leissner, Manuel Chang, and every other individual prosecuted under the FCPA. The scheme they participated in, and which the company that employed them will not be prosecuted for, will be the factual predicate for whatever sentences they ultimately receive.

That is not a failure of the policy. That is the policy working as designed. The question is whether that design — in which institutional accountability is primarily financial and individual accountability is primarily carceral — is the accountability framework we mean to have, or simply the one we have built without fully accounting for what it says about who the system treats as a criminal.