{"id":187,"date":"2012-05-26T12:47:09","date_gmt":"2012-05-26T11:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikebirdblog.wordpress.com\/?p=16"},"modified":"2024-04-16T14:54:20","modified_gmt":"2024-04-16T13:54:20","slug":"one-law-for-us-another-law-for-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikebird.me\/?p=187","title":{"rendered":"One law for us, another law for them"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Government is planning a new law that could \u201cbring about a revolution in corporate crime enforcement\u201d. That means letting off their mates if they play ball.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They claim the present justice system is \u201cinadequate for dealing effectively with criminal enforcement against commercial organisations in the field of complex and serious economic crime (fraud, bribery and money laundering)\u201d.\u00a0 It is true that very few cases are brought against offending companies through criminal or civil proceedings is relatively low.\u00a0 Cases can be extremely complicated, and corporate criminals can be very good at tying investigators in knots.<\/p>\n

A possible solution would be for state prosecutors to employ enough experts to analyse and present corporate crimes to juries in such a way that doesn\u2019t require lay people to become accounting and corporate law experts. It is not acceptable to take decisions on these sort of crimes away from the British people, who should be the decisive factor in all criminal cases not dealt with by Magistrates\u2019 Benches.<\/p>\n

But the Government proposals mean there would be no criminal cases to consider in the first place!<\/p>\n

Proposals for Deferred Prosecution Agreements mean criminal charges would not be brought as long as corporate offenders agreed to things like:<\/p>\n