Contemporary Economic Crime

Piercing the links between crime and money requires vigilance and the constant adaption of strategies. Finance undergirds much modern evil – from corruption, fraud and tax evasion to trafficking in drugs and the sex-trafficking of children. To achieve any measure of success in harnessing evil, intervention must be grounded on a solid understanding. This series of essays offers rich insight on crime and criminal financing. Amidst a range of topics, the series examines financial institutions and their complicity in human rights violations in the context of authoritarian regimes; digital intermediaries and their role in facilitating sex trafficking; modern technological innovations such as open banking and the connection to terrorist financing; offshore transparency, beneficial ownership, and illicit funds; and corruption as an endemic feature of societies as well as a problem once resisted through adequate financial laws. Offering a global portrait forged of jurisdictions stretching from the United Kingdom and the United States to Hong Kong and Bulgaria, this collection will be of interest to practitioners, scholars and professionals.

Michelle Gallant PhD, Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba, Canada

Contemporary Economic Crime is a must read for anyone interested in financial crime and corporate criminal liability. The book offers excellent insights and analysis of corporate financial crimes and enforcement methods used against culpable companies in different jurisdictions. This edited collection presents a selection of unique and insightful perspectives into corporate wrongdoing and sanctions enforced against corporate bodies. It will be of great interest to both practitioners and academics.

Diana Johnson PhD, Senior Lecturer, Bristol Law School, University of the West of England, United Kingdom

One of the tremendous benefits of this book is that it is responsive to the needs of different audiences. To people relatively unfamiliar with the broad topic of economic crime, the chapters collectively provide an introduction to a number of important areas (from fraud-based offences in the UK, to the contours of how a corporation can be held liable for mens rea crimes, to cyber-criminality through the lens of sex trafficking, among others). This introduction gives the neophyte an easy entry into some difficult areas of law. For those who open this book with a moderate understanding of some of these issues, the chapters also discuss potential issues that will likely arise going forward, and/or make recommendations for how the law under consideration could potentially be improved.As an academic working outside of Europe, a collection like this one can bring important thinkers to my attention that I might otherwise have missed. The footnotes and bibliographies in the various chapters offer a number of starting points for further research. Among others, people who want to use a comparative approach in research about economic should definitely read this volume.

Darcy L. MacPherson, Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Manitoba,Research Director, Marcel A. Desautels Centre for Private Enterprise and the Law

Contemporary Economic Crime - Issues and Challenges situates the phenomenon of corporate criminality within a comparative framework and with reference to various jurisdictions and specific crimes. While the chapters are varied and diverse in terms of subject matter and focus, they all share the same assumption, that corporations/corporate entities are not only the abstract legal fictions of doctrinal debates and criminal law theory, but are indeed actors with significant commercial, trade, and political influence and impact. The value of this volume, then, is in the application of well-known and sometimes contested theory to increasingly complex criminal phenomena. The work will be of interest to an audience beyond the United Kingdom. Indeed, the work shows how interrelated legal frameworks have become in the age of corporate and financial globalisation.

Gerhard Kemp, Professor of Criminal Law, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Michala Meiselles is Senior Law Lecturer at Derby University’s Law School. She sits on the RASSO and hate crimes scrutiny panels for the Crown Prosecution Service in the East Midlands and has advised UNESCO on online safety and digital rights. Moreover, she is director of an inter-institutional think tank dedicated to corporate crime which explores white-collar crime, cybercrime and modern slavery. Her research and teaching activities focus inter alia on financial crime, cybercrime, and the role of digital providers in the fight against cybercrime.

Nicholas Ryder is a Professor of Financial Crime at Cardiff University’s School of Law and Politics and has played advisory roles both nationally (e.g. for the Home Office, the Home Affairs Select Committee the Law Commission, Transparency International, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and internationally (e.g. NATO, United Nations, Cepol, Europol). He has created and edits Routledge’s Law of Financial Crime Series.

Penelope Giosa is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Reading and the Convenor of the SLS (Society of Legal Scholars) Comparative Law section. She has an educational and professional background in both civil and common law systems. Her research interests focus on Competition Law, Public Procurement, Food Law and White-Collar crimes.