Corporate Criminal Liability is on the rise worldwide: More and more legal systems now include genuinely criminal sanctioning for legal entities. The various regulatory options available to national criminal justice systems, their implications and their constitutional, economic and psychological parameters are key questions addressed in this volume. Specific emphasis is put on procedural questions relating to corporate criminal liability, on alternative sanctions such as blacklisting of corporations, on common corporate crimes and on questions of transnational criminal justice.

This edited collection sheds light on the evolution of corporate financial crime, exploring a myriad of offenses ranging from money laundering and fraud to market manipulation and bribery. Considering and assessing the models used in national law to determine the culpability of corporations, this book compares the different schemes used to address financial and other organisational crimes committed by these entities. Through a combination of history, law, and global perspectives, its chapters dissect landmark cases and provide detailed analyses of money laundering, fraud, market manipulation, manslaughter, and legislative responses in various locations around the world. This comparative approach offers a unique lens, exploring diverse jurisdictions and shedding light on global patterns of corporate wrongdoing. By critically assessing the challenges of prosecuting economic crimes on a large scale, the collection proposes innovative solutions, including the introduction of ‘failure to prevent’ offences. Corporate Criminal Liability and Sanctions: Current Trends and Policy Changes is a valuable resource for academics, professionals, and anyone intrigued by the ever-evolving realm of white-collar and corporate wrongdoing. It will appeal to scholars across the fields of law, criminology, sociology, and economics, as well as those professionally engaged in preventing and investigating corruption and in developing or enforcing regulation, such as solicitors, barristers, businessmen, and public servants.

Dated January 2017. A TSO version of a title previously published by HM Government made available under the Open Government Licence v3.0(http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/)

When corporations carry on their business in a grossly negligent manner, or take a cavalier approach to risk management, the consequences can be catastrophic. The harm may be financial, as occurred when such well-regarded companies as Enron, Lehman Brothers, Worldcom and Barings collapsed, or it may be environmental, as illustrated most recently by the Gulf oil spill. Sometimes deaths and serious injuries on a mass scale occur, as in the Bhopal gas disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear explosion, the Paris crash of the Concorde, the capsize of the Herald of Free Enterprise, and rail crashes at Southall, Paddington and Hatfield in England.What role can the law play in preventing such debacles and in punishing the corporate offenders? This collection of thematic papers and European country reports addresses these questions at both a theoretical and empirical level. The thematic papers analyse corporate criminal liability from a range of academic disciplines, including law, sociology/criminology, economics, philosophy and environmental studies, whilst the country reports look at the laws of corporate crime throughout Europe, highlighting both common features and irreconcilable differences between the various jurisdictions.

With industrialization and globalization, corporations acquired the capacity to influence social life for good or for ill. Yet, corporations are not traditional objects of criminal law. Justified by notions of personal moral guilt, criminal norms have been judged inapplicable to fictional persons, who ‘think’ and ‘act’ through human beings. The expansion of new corporate criminal liability (CCL) laws since the mid-1990s challenges this assumption. Our volume surveys current practice on CCL in 15 civil and common law jurisdictions, exploring the legal conditions for liability, the principles and options for sanctioning, and the procedures for investigating, charging and trying corporate offenders. It considers whether municipal CCL laws are converging around the notion of ‘corporate culture’, and, in any case, the implications of CCL for those charged with keeping corporations, and other legal entities, out of trouble.