European Journal of Criminology

This article implements a crime script analysis to understand the procedural dynamics of corporate benchmark-rigging in the financial services industry. In 2012 several global banks were implicated in the manipulation of various trading benchmarks, portraying the industry as affected by serious, pervasive and ‘organized’ corporate crimes. Yet their dynamics have been relatively little studied by criminologists. To address this gap, we analyse official enforcement documentation, supplemented with data from interviews with key informants in the UK financial markets. We analyse the range of interactions between the relevant actors, their actions and the resources essential to the manipulations, and deconstruct the benchmark manipulations into four scenes (calculated positioning and identification of co-collaborators; recruitment; (ephemeral) manipulation; recompense and solicitation). The analysis reveals that regulatory and organizational systems play a paradoxical role of both ‘capable guardians’ and ‘facilitators of misconduct’; this has implications for criminological theory.

The article will analyse the greatest Hungarian securities fraud to date: the Quaestor scandal. Quaestor was a holding of several companies, including one of Hungary’s biggest investment adviser and brokerage firms, which went into bankruptcy in early 2015. Later investigations uncovered a massive fraud with an estimated loss close to €500 million to investors, mainly caused by affiliated companies overselling their bonds many times over the limit set by the securities regulator. Using theoretical approaches from comparative political economy, economic sociology and organizational theory, the article will analyse how the institutional context of economic action on the financial markets was conductive to the fraud. Two major factors in particular will be emphasized: the political economy of finance, especially the underdeveloped nature of financial markets and the lack of a retail investor class; and the relative scarcity of capital.

The literature suggests many different variables that may explain rule violations by companies. These can be categorized into variables at the industry level, such as the degree of rule violations, at the company level, such as the organizational culture, and at the individual level, such as personal or social norms. From the Dutch Tax Administration’s (2009) registration data, industries were selected with relatively low and relatively high tax correction rates. Within these industries, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with 20–150 employees were selected that either had received no (or negative) corrections or had received large positive corrections, resulting in a population of 1558 companies. In 194 of these SMEs, both the director and an employee were interviewed about violations of administrative, environmental and tax obligations, about their personal motives and about the ethical organizational culture. The results of the study show that all three levels of variables explain intentions to comply or to violate the rules. Ethical culture contributes to explaining the compliance intentions of both directors and employees. However, in contrast to previous research, about half of the SMEs cannot be characterized by a coherent ethical culture.

Harm facilitated by corporations has received increased attention in recent years. However, corporate crime and harm remain under-researched themes in relation to labour exploitation, in both theoretical and empirical terms. The purpose of this article is to argue that, in the context of agricultural and food supply networks, harmful labour practices result from structural problems associated with the demand for products. Although individual employers and businesses have a role in facilitating these harmful practices, these practices also emerge from otherwise legitimate agri-food supply network dynamics, such as subcontracted labour, which results in fragmented responsibility. Therefore, labour practices have significant implications for the nature, organization and control of corporate harms, whereby harmful consequences become normalized, accepted and embedded in agri-food supply network practices. Criminological analyses of food production and contemporary markets more widely can begin to address the systemic challenges of harmful labour practices, in both domestic and global supply networks.

This article examines the generative conditions giving rise to the commission of irresponsible risk-taking in the Irish banking sector using differential association and opportunity theories. This framework is used as a lens to demonstrate how, at both an individual and a group level, ideas, beliefs, expectations, rewards and punishments had a causal impact on banking culture, where competitive and aggressive risk-taking was prioritised, networked and routinised. Though differential association theory and opportunity theory are usually treated as separate (and somewhat opposing) perspectives, this article offers a framework that integrates them both. It employs differential association only as a partial explanation, explaining that wrongdoing does not occur only where there is an excess of ‘definitions’ favouring it; it occurs when capable guardians are removed or undercut. The opportunity perspective is adopted to examine how the absence of credible supervision and enforcement in the financial services sector created situational conditions that facilitated wrongdoing. Moreover, opportunity theory is valuable in this context because it explains that the extent to which protection is offered often depends on political processes to create a structure and culture of enforcement and prosecution of offenders. Prior to the crisis, Ireland was championing light-touch regulation, advertising itself as an attractive place to do business, in which there was insufficient political support for tough sanctions to address financial wrongdoing.

Leniency offers corporations the possibility to come clean about their involvement in cartel conduct (for example, price-fixing, bid-rigging) in exchange for immunity or reduction of financial penalties. In Europe, nearly 60 percent of detected cartels are discovered through leniency. This makes leniency the most applied detection tool for uncovering cartel conduct violations. What are the considerations in applying for leniency or refraining from doing so? How do those considerations relate to private law enforcement through civil liability regarding business cartels? These questions are discussed based on semi-structured interviews (n = 34) with cartelists, competition lawyers and in-house legal counsel to study theoretical assumptions underpinning leniency arrangements in the Netherlands. This study investigates four scenarios on the use of leniency suggested in the literature and finds empirical support for only two. Strategic use of leniency and false confessions occur in the Netherlands, but to a lesser extent than the existing literature suggests. Moreover, various disincentives, and especially the rise of private enforcement, make leniency an unattractive and uncertain option for cartelists.