1st Edition

Regulating Corporate Bribery in International Business Anti-corruption in the UK and Germany

By Nicholas Lord Copyright 2014
    214 Pages
    by Routledge

    214 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book is about the regulation of corporations that use bribery in international commerce to win or maintain overseas business contracts and interests. Recent large-scale cases involving multinational corporations demonstrate how large commercial ’non-criminal’ enterprises are being implicated in substantive overseas bribery scandals and illustrate the difficulties faced by responsible enforcement authorities in the UK and Germany. The book imports concepts from regulation theory to aid our understanding of the emerging enforcement, self-regulatory and hybrid responses to transnational corporate bribery. Lord implements a qualitative, comparative research strategy involving semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis to provide empirical insights into this relatively invisible area of criminological interest. Despite significant cultural differences between the jurisdictions, this book argues that UK and German anti-corruption authorities face procedural, evidential, legal, financial and structural difficulties that are leading to convergence in prosecution policies. Although self-regulatory and hybrid mechanisms are aiding the response and gaining some level of regulation, the default position is one of accommodation by state agencies, even where the will to enforce the law is high. This book is essential reading for academics and students researching corporate and white-collar crimes and the concept of regulation more generally, as well as law enforcement agencies and international and intergovernmental organisations concerned with anti-corruption.

    Chapter 1 Introduction; Chapter 2 What is ‘Transnational Corporate Bribery’ and Why Do We Need to Regulate It?; Chapter 3 Conceptualising the ‘Regulatory’ Framework: Policing as Regulation; Chapter 4 Legal Frameworks for Enforcement: From the International to the National; Chapter 5 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as follows: Lord, N. (2014) ‘Detecting and investigating transnational corporate bribery in centralised and decentralised enforcement systems: discretion and (de-)prioritisation in the UK and Germany’ Policing and Society, DOI: 10.1080/10439463.2014.895350; Chapter 6 Theories of Enforcement: Prosecution Policies; Chapter 7 Theories of Self-regulation: Manufactured and Organic Self-regulatory Practices; Chapter 8 Understanding ‘Regulatory’ Performance and Determining ‘Adequate’ Enforcement; Chapter 9 The ‘Default Position’: Accommodating Transnational Corporate Bribery;

    Biography

    Nicholas Lord is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Manchester. He has research expertise in the area of white-collar and corporate crimes of a financial and economic nature such as fraud, corruption and bribery along with interests in regulation theory and corporate governance. He completed his PhD in criminology and an MSc in Social Science Research Methods in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University and his BA in Criminology and German at Lancaster University.

    Prize: Nicholas Lord is winner of the Criminology Book Prize 2015, awarded by the British Society of Criminology. Nicholas Lord is winner of the 2014 Young Career Award of the White-Collar Crime Research Consortium / National White-Collar Crime Center, USA 'The significance of Nicholas Lord's book lies in its analysis of the complexities and dynamics of translating international conventions into domestic legislation and then implementing them effectively at a country level. In doing so, it brings to the anti-corruption discourse at both academic and policy-maker levels, a wider perspective in terms of substantive and evidenced understanding of the rhetoric and realities of anti-corruption initiatives and agendas within country contexts.’ Alan Doig, Northumbria University, UK ’Nicholas Lord shows in this conceptually innovative and thoroughly researched comparative study just why efforts to counter transnational corporate bribery - unquantifiable but assumed to be widespread - rarely get beyond the symbolic. Encouraging self-regulation and reaching negotiated settlements with offenders is usually as good as it gets.’ Peter Gill, University of Liverpool, UK ’This excellent book is that rare thing - a readable and detailed examination of the dilemmas that contemporary societies - especially the UK and Germany - face in dealing with corporations operating transnationally in international commerce that use bribery to win or maintain contracts in overseas jurisdictions, often poor countries that most NGO campaigns focus on. Nick Lord persuasively argues that historical traditions have left a contemporary legacy that complicates international co-operation in prosecuting transnational and complexly organised corporate crimes. With well researched case studies, he shows that these historical traditions help us understand the limitations of criminal sanctioning by sovereign actors as an enforcement mechanism for controlling illicit corporate behaviour. He thoughtfu