Lorinda Laryea

Lorinda Ivy Laryea joined the fraud section's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit as a trial attorney in early 2014, bringing an impressive academic background and international experience. She became an assistant chief in September 2018, and was promoted to acting principal assistant chief in April 2021. Laryea held the position permanently a few months later, before being elevated to co-acting principal deputy chief of the Fraud Section in October 2021.

Laryea was listed as the trial attorney in the declination letter sent by the DOJ in September 2016 to oil supply company HMT under the FCPA pilot programme. The DOJ said it declined to prosecute HMT over allegations that the company participated in bribery schemes in Venezuela and China because it self-reported the matter, cooperated with the subsequent investigatedion and remediated – in compliance with the terms set out under the FCPA pilot programme. HMT disgorged US$2.7 million in profits as part of the declination.

A native of Ghana, Laryea graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 2004 in Political Science and Hispanic Studies.

After graduating from Brown, Laryea spent a year working for Goldman Sachs in the fixed income sales and trading division.

By 2006, she had moved to Brazil to work with Arlington, Virginia-based ASHOKA-Innovators for the Public, a non-profit organisation that focuses on educating and empowering social entrepreneurs across the globe to improve their local communities.

In Brazil, Laryea worked on ASHOKA's "Law for All Initiative", which aims to help ordinary people understand and exercise their constitutional and legal rights. She travelled throughout Brazil, Peru and Argentina to develop workshops of the initiative. Today, she is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish – language skills that will no doubt be of use in her FCPA law enforcement work.

For law school Laryea enrolled at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. There, she was a global law scholar, notes editor of the Georgetown Journal of International Law, a law fellow, and a legal writing teaching assistant. She participated in the world finals of the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition and was awarded the prize for best brief. She contributed to the International Migrant Bill of Rights, which set out a framework for universal protection of migrants based on international laws and treaties.

After earning her law degree from Georgetown in 2010, Laryea joined Gibson Dunn & Crutcher's Washington office as an associate for two years in the litigation department. She left Gibson Dunn to clerk for US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the District of Columbia, before joining the Justice Department.

Since being at the FCPA unit, she's taken a lead role in the prosecution of individuals accused of participating in a bribery scheme at Ecuador's state-controlled oil company PetroEcuador.

Laryea is a member of the bars of New York and the District of Columbia.