Criminal
24 July 2020 - Post by:
Recent guidelines from the French Minister of Justice reveal a heightened willingness of French authorities to combat corruption-related offences and to prosecute more individuals. The guidance, contained in a Circular, also strongly encourages corporations to voluntarily self-disclose internal suspicions of corrupt practices. A call for self-reporting The Circular calls for self-reporting by corporations, stressing that › Read More
Direct access – a sea change in data gathering in UK/U.S. criminal investigations
08 July 2020 - Post by:
A new UK/U.S. bilateral agreement for accessing electronic data in cases of serious crime, which was negotiated and released in autumn 2019, is about to enter into force. The Agreement represents a sea change in cross-border investigations. The Agreement permits criminal authorities in each country to obtain electronic data directly from a range of telecommunications › Read More
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