On July 17, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) announced its second Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) corporate enforcement resolution of 2026,[1] as well as the first non-declination enforcement of the year—a deferred prosecution agreement (“DPA”) with Scoular Company (“Scoular”), a Nebraska-based agricultural supply and logistics company, in a case filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas.[2] The DOJ charged Scoular with one count of conspiracy to violate the FCPA’s anti-bribery provisions for using customs brokers to pay more than $400,000 in bribes to Mexican agricultural officials to avoid fees and delays associated with inspections and ensure the importation of cross-border rail shipments of corn and other products. As part of the agreement, Scoular agreed to pay a criminal penalty of $9,769,521 and forfeiture of $414,351, and entered into a three-year DPA.[3]
The Scoular case is related to the DOJ’s prosecution of El Paso, Texas-based customs broker Carlos Leopoldo Alvelais, who pled guilty in October 2025 to an FCPA conspiracy violation charge and was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment on July 20, 2026—just days after the announcement of the Scoular resolution. According to the DOJ, Alvelais and his customs brokerage team operated as third-party intermediaries in the Scoular bribery scheme.
While the Scoular and Alvelais charging documents make no reference to cartels or transnational criminal organizations (“TCOs”), which remain a focal point for the current Administration, the DOJ stated in its press release that some of the bribe payments at issue “ultimately benefitted people who helped operate a cartel” and more generally that “[n]othing crosses into or out of Mexico without the approval and payment to Mexican drug cartels.”
Allegations Overview
According to the DOJ, from 2013 to 2019, Scoular relied on third-party customs brokers to assist with the movement of corn and other agricultural products by train from the United States into Mexico. Mexican agricultural authorities inspected those shipments for dirt, soil and other impurities, and in order to ensure that shipments cleared the border, Scoular is alleged to have utilized customs brokers to pay a combined $400,000+ in bribes to Mexican officials, thereby avoiding more than $6.5 million in fees and other costs. The brokers allegedly paid around $2,000 to $3,000 per train in bribes at the direction of Scoular employees; those amounts were then billed to Scoular and paid as “reinspection fees.”
The Scoular resolution is connected to the prosecution of Alvelais, who was the founder and president of a freight forwarding and logistics company incorporated in Texas. According to a recently unsealed plea agreement, Alvelais worked as an agent of an unnamed “Agricultural Supply Company”—now understood to be Scoular—since 2013. Alvelais acknowledged that he and his employees, as well as employees and agents of Scoular, engaged in the scheme described above to avoid fees and delays associated with the detection of impurities. These corrupt payments were made because Scoular allegedly had not obtained regulatory or legal authorization to treat such impurities at Mexican facilities. According to Alvelais, Scoular employees authorized the payments associated with the scheme, and Alvelais received more than $250,000 in reimbursements from Scoular for such payments.
Alvelais allegedly sent Scoular employees an email in June 2013 proposing that Scoular pay a “fee” for every train to ensure it would not face “a single risk of adverse determinations from Mexican inspectors.” The charging document also cites emails from 2015 and 2019 in which employees of Alvelais invoiced Scoular for charges associated with Mexico’s former federal agricultural ministry—the Secretaría de Agricultura, Ganadería, Desarrollo Rural, Pesca y Alimentación (“SAGARPA”). For example, an August 2015 email from a member of Alvelais’s team advised a Scoular employee that after a shipment was found to contain soil during a SAGARPA inspection, “[t]he train has been released and will not have delays” and that “[t]his account will include a charge of 2,000 usd by this issue”; a similar invoice sent by an employee of Alvelais to Scoular in May 2019 contained a $3,000 “SAGARPA process” fee. The plea agreement references a 2023 email in which a Scoular employee confirmed Alvelais’s continued engagement as the company’s customs broker, after which Alvelais continued to receive fees labeled as associated with SAGARPA in connection with Scoular from a third party.
Resolution
According to the DOJ’s press release, Scoular was not eligible for a Part I (declination) or Part II (NPA) resolution under the DOJ’s Corporate Enforcement Policy because Scoular did not voluntarily self-report the matter.[4] The public record does not reflect how the matter came to the attention of the DOJ. Nonetheless, the $9,769,521 criminal penalty reflects a 25% reduction from the lowest applicable guidelines range as a result of Scoular’s cooperation with the investigation and remedial measures. Scoular received cooperation credit for its internal investigation into the misconduct, provision of information and evidence to the DOJ, production of materials in response to voluntary requests by the DOJ and securing counsel for employees. The DOJ also recognized the company for its timely remedial measures, including restructuring its compliance function, strengthening risk-based review and monitoring procedures and eliminating the use of customs brokers associated with the reinspection fees.
Prior Enforcement Involving Customs Brokers
The DOJ’s focus on customs brokers as a bribery conduit in FCPA cases is not new, and the Scoular resolution fits a well-established enforcement pattern. In 2017, the DOJ and SEC alleged that the Mexican subsidiary of Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc. used a customs broker and its subagents to pay bribes to Mexican customs officials to facilitate the importation of dental products, funneling nearly $980,774 to the broker’s subagents while knowing that at least some of that amount would be passed on to Mexican customs officials—a structure that, like Scoular’s use of “reinspection fees,” obscured the bribes as ordinary business costs. Zimmer Biomet entered into a DPA and agreed to pay more than $30 million in penalties to resolve the matter.[5] Earlier, in its 2010 landmark prosecution in this area, the DOJ and SEC alleged that international freight forwarding and logistics firm Panalpina, Inc. paid and falsely recorded at least $27 million in bribes to customs officials in multiple jurisdictions, including Nigeria, Angola, Brazil, Russia and Kazakhstan on behalf of its oil and gas clients to obtain favorable customs treatment. Similar to Scoular’s case, the bribes were invoiced to customers under innocuous labels such as “local processing” fees, “special intervention” and “special handling” charges rather than being described as bribes. The resolution with Panalpina and its customers led to several DPAs and more than $156 million in criminal penalties.[6]
Key Takeaways
The Scoular resolution confirms the DOJ’s continued focus on U.S.-Mexico cross-border activities, cartels/TCOs and customs brokers as high-risk intermediaries:
- Border Zones: The U.S. government remains focused on matters with national security implications and the U.S.-Mexico border remains ground zero in the Administration’s effort to combat unauthorized migration, illicit drug trafficking and other crimes. The DOJ press release does not mince words about the risk of cross-border shipments, cautioning companies that “[n]othing crosses into or out of Mexico without the approval and payment to Mexican drug cartels” and if companies “engage in any cross-border trade, [they] bear a significant amount of responsibility to do so without benefitting those cartels and without threatening our national security.” Companies should consider these cautionary words as an indication of how broadly the DOJ may construe the concept of “knowledge.”
- Cartels/TCOs: In June 2025, the DOJ cautioned in its Guidelines for Investigations and Enforcement of the FCPA that “one primary consideration in deciding whether to pursue an FCPA investigation or enforcement action is whether the alleged misconduct (1) is associated with the criminal operations of a Cartel or TCO; (2) utilizes money launderers or shell companies that engage in money laundering for Cartels or TCOs; or (3) is linked to employees of state-owned entities or other foreign officials who have received bribes from Cartels or TCOs.”[7] While scant on details, this resolution suggests that even more attenuated situations—those in which companies lack any actual knowledge that their payments are “benefit[ing] persons associated with the criminal operations of a cartel operating at the U.S.-Mexico border”—may be enough to establish a cartel link in the view of the DOJ. The DOJ’s cautionary language in the press release underscores the danger of conducting business in regions where cartels/TCOs have a dominant presence, and counsels in favor of risk assessments to help identify and address potential exposure.
- Customs Brokers: We anticipate continued scrutiny of customs brokers, and companies should be careful not only with the diligencing of such third parties but also with closely monitoring invoices for questionable fees and other red flags. In particular, companies utilizing Alvelais’s firm, or perhaps any customs broker or freight forwarding firm handling U.S.-Mexico freight movement, should consider proactively reviewing relevant invoices and other records to assess whether there are any issues.
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[1] The first corporate FCPA resolution of 2026 was a declination involving Balt SAS, a French medical device company. See U.S. Dep’t of Just., Justice Department Resolves Foreign Bribery Investigation with Balt SAS; Healthcare Executive and Sales Consultant Indicted in Alleged Years-Long Foreign Bribery Scheme (Mar. 19, 2026), available here.
[2] U.S. Dep’t of Just., Agricultural Company to Pay Over $10M to Resolve Foreign Bribery Case (Jul. 17, 2026), available here.
[3] At the time of publication, the DPA had yet to be publicly released.
[4] U.S. Dep’t of Just., Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy (Mar. 10, 2026), available here; see Paul, Weiss, DOJ Releases “First-Ever” Department-Wide Corporate Enforcement Policy (Mar. 12, 2026), available here.
[5] U.S. Dep’t of Just., Zimmer Biomet Holdings Inc. Agrees to Pay $17.4 Million to Resolve Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Charges (Jan. 12, 2017), available here.
[6] U.S. Dep’t of Just., Oil Services Companies and a Freight Forwarding Company Agree to Resolve Foreign Bribery Investigations and to Pay More Than $156 Million in Criminal Penalties (Nov. 4, 2010), available here.
[7] Memorandum from the U.S. Dep’t of Just. Dep. Att’y Gen. to Head of the Crim. Div., Guidelines for Investigations and Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), at 2 (Jun. 9, 2025), available here.
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