Criminal
Watershed moment for prosecution of corporate crimes in Germany gets closer
28 April 2020 - Post by:
Resistance has been futile. Although practitioners and academics strongly criticised a previous working draft, the German Federal Ministry of Justice has now formally published its proposal for a Corporate Sanctions Act (Verbandssanktionengesetz, the Draft Bill). The Draft Bill reflects some of the concerns that were raised about the previous draft (discussed here). It has become › Read More
When criminal law affects your obligations to others
29 January 2020 - Post by:
Looking back at 2019 there were a number of interesting English civil court rulings which highlighted the difficulties faced by a party trying to balance obligations (e.g. to a contractual counterparty, a customer or to the court) when there is suspected criminality or a clash with foreign criminal law. Here are four which we found interesting: › Read More
Parent company atones for the crimes of a subsidiary
18 July 2019 - Post by:
The fifth DPA, between the SFO and Serco Geografix Ltd, is the first in which a parent company has undertaken to pay a penalty and oversee a group wide reinforcement of its compliance programme even though it was not liable for the underlying fraud and false accounting by its subsidiary. Also worthy of note are › Read More
Should I breach confidentiality to report suspected criminality?
03 July 2019 - Post by:
A recent case throws up some interesting issues concerning when it is OK (and when it is not OK) to breach confidence in order to report suspected criminality. The case concerned some private investigators who decided to report their clients for suspected criminal conduct, rather than keep confidential the results of their investigation: Saab & › Read More
SFO rhetoric about cooperating witnesses continues to pile on the pressure
20 June 2019 - Post by:
Lisa Osofsky, Director of the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO), has talked about wanting to bring cases to life for juries by relying on cooperating offenders to give evidence against senior individuals. She reinforced this message last week at the GIR Live, Women in Investigations conference. The SFO’s aim here is to bring more senior › Read More