Bribery and improper benefits: what to do in the first ten days comes down to containment. When an allegation surfaces inside a Swedish company, those days determine what evidence survives, who can be interviewed under privilege, and whether a voluntary report changes the company's position. Priority: preserve records, limit communication about it, and settle representation before anyone contacts the authorities.
Who this concerns
This applies to any company operating in Sweden that receives a report touching bribery or an improper benefit (otillbörlig förmån) — a payment, a gift, hospitality, a consultancy fee, or a favour connected to someone's employment, office, or commission. The report can arrive through a whistleblower channel, an auditor's query, a counterparty's complaint, an internal audit finding, or a call from the Economic Crime Authority. It concerns board members and executives who now have to decide how the company responds, compliance and legal functions asked to lead that response, and any individual named in the allegation, whether as the person who gave the benefit or the one who received it.
It also concerns companies with a Swedish subsidiary reporting up to a foreign parent, where the first ten days involve a second decision layer: what gets disclosed upward, and when, before the domestic response is even settled.
What the law says
Under Swedish law as it currently stands, giving, promising, or accepting an improper benefit in connection with a person's employment, office, or commission is a criminal offence on both sides of the transaction — the giver and the recipient. The offence does not require a public official; it applies equally in commercial, private-sector relationships. Corporate exposure runs through a separate route rather than direct criminal liability attaching to the company as such: the conduct of individuals acting for the company can trigger consequences for the company itself, independent of what happens to those individuals personally.
There is no single threshold that makes a benefit "improper" in every case. What counts depends on the relationship between the parties, the position of the person receiving the benefit, whether it was disclosed, and whether it was capable of influencing a decision connected to that position. This is a question of fact in each case, not a fixed monetary line, and treating it as one is one of the more common early misreadings of the situation.
How it works in practice
Day one: contain before you investigate
The instinct is to start finding out what happened. The correct first move is narrower: stop the exposure from growing while the facts are still unclear. That means identifying who currently has access to the relevant files, systems, and correspondence, and deciding — quietly — whether that access needs to change before anyone starts asking questions that tip off the people involved.
Deciding who leads the response
Someone has to own the process from day one, and it should not default to the person whose conduct is under question, even if that person is senior. In practice this means the board or a designated committee decides, in writing, who runs the response, who reports to whom, and who is excluded from the loop entirely.
Establishing privilege before anyone is interviewed
Internal notes, emails between executives discussing the allegation, and early interview memos are not automatically protected. Whether privilege attaches depends on when outside counsel is engaged and how the investigation is framed from that point. Waiting until after the first internal conversations have already happened is the single most common way that protection is lost before it is ever tested.
Preserving documents and communications
This is mechanical, not investigative: hold notices to IT, a freeze on document destruction schedules that would otherwise run automatically, and a record of who was told to preserve what and when. The point is not to analyse the material yet. It is to make sure it still exists when someone does.
Interviewing employees: sequence and protections
Who gets interviewed first, and what they are told about their own position, shapes everything that follows. An employee interviewed as a potential witness needs a different framing from one interviewed because their own conduct is in question — and confusing the two, even unintentionally, can compromise both the interview and the person's later position if the matter escalates to a formal questioning as suspect.
Deciding whether to approach the authorities first
A voluntary approach to the authorities can change how the company's conduct is read later, but it also removes control over the pace and scope of what follows. This decision should not be made inside the first forty-eight hours on instinct. It should be made once there is at least a preliminary picture of what actually happened and who was involved.
The foreign element: cross-border reporting lines
Where the counterparty, the benefit, or the individuals involved sit outside Sweden, the first ten days carry an extra layer. A foreign parent company may have its own mandatory disclosure obligations that run on a different clock than the Swedish process, and a benefit that touches a foreign public official can bring a second country's anti-bribery regime into play alongside the Swedish one. Coordinating these tracks — deciding what is told to whom, and in what order — has to happen early, because a disclosure made abroad cannot be walked back once it reaches a foreign regulator.
What to check in the first ten days
- Who currently has access to the files, accounts, or correspondence connected to the allegation, and whether that access should be restricted now
- Whether outside counsel has been engaged in a way that supports privilege over notes and interviews
- Which document retention or deletion schedules would otherwise run automatically and need to be paused
- Whether the person named in the allegation still holds a role that gives them influence over the same relationship or transaction
- Whether a foreign parent, subsidiary, or regulator has its own disclosure obligation running on a separate timeline
- Whether any employee interviewed so far was told, correctly, whether they were being treated as a witness or as a person whose own conduct is in question
- Whether the board or leadership has a single point of decision-making, or whether the response is currently being run by more than one uncoordinated line
Frequently asked questions
Should the company self-report before it completes its own review?
Not before there is at least a preliminary account of what happened and who was involved. Reporting on an incomplete picture can commit the company to a version of events that later turns out to be wrong, which is harder to correct than a short delay while the facts are established properly.
Can employees be interviewed before a lawyer is engaged?
They can, but the notes and conclusions from those interviews will usually not be protected, and the framing given to the employee about their own position may need to be redone later under proper advice. Engaging counsel first is what makes the interviews usable rather than a liability.
What happens if the police contact the company directly in the first ten days?
Any contact should be routed to whoever is leading the internal response, not answered informally by whoever picks up the call. What is said in that first conversation, even casually, can shape how the company's position is read from that point forward.
The numbers
There is no fixed statutory countdown that starts the moment an allegation surfaces; the "ten days" framing is operational, not a deadline set by regulation. What varies from case to case is not a number but a set of factors that determine how quickly the position hardens: how many people already know about the allegation, how many jurisdictions are involved, how much of the relevant documentation sits on systems the company controls directly versus systems held by a third party, and whether a foreign parent's own reporting clock is already running independently of the Swedish process. Cost follows the same pattern — it is driven by the number of individuals whose conduct needs separate review, the volume of documents to be preserved and read, and how many disclosure tracks have to be coordinated at once, not by a fixed scope that can be quoted before the facts are known.
Where it usually goes wrong
The most common mistake is treating the first response as an investigation rather than as containment. Companies start interviewing people and drawing conclusions before they have secured the underlying documents, and by the time counsel is engaged, some of what would have mattered is already gone or contaminated by informal conversations.
A second recurring error is leaving the person named in the allegation in a position where they still control the same files, accounts, or relationships while the matter is being looked into. This is rarely deliberate; it happens because no one made an explicit decision to change it.
A third is assuming that "improper benefit" means cash or an obvious bribe. Hospitality, a favour to a family member, a consultancy arrangement with no clear deliverable — these fall inside the same concept, and treating only the obvious cases as serious is how a genuine exposure gets missed in the first review.
The guidance in this piece stops applying once there has been a search, a seizure, or a formal request from the authorities for specific documents. At that point the company is no longer setting its own pace; the ten-day framing assumes the company still has some control over sequencing, and that control disappears the moment a coercive step has already been taken. From that point, the questions shift from containment to how the company and its people respond to a formal process that is already under way, including how anyone questioned handles being treated as a suspect rather than a witness.
What to do next
This material covers what a company can and should do on its own before anyone outside is involved: containment, document preservation, and getting the sequencing of interviews right. It does not cover what happens once the facts are established and the company has to weigh its actual exposure, or once an individual is called in for questioning and needs to understand the difference between being treated as a witness and being treated as a suspect. That is a document-specific assessment, not a general one, and it starts once the outline of what happened is on the table.
For a structured look at what an assessment of the position involves, start with the practice overview. Where the situation has already moved to someone being called in for questioning, the relevant next read is what happens when you're questioned as a suspect or a witness. To talk through where the company's own work should stop and an outside assessment should begin, get in touch directly.