Nicholas Lord

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.

Anti-corruption in the UK and Germany

Regulating Corporate Bribery in International Business

Liz Campbell

This edited collection analyses, from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the issue of corruption in commercial enterprise across different sectors and jurisdictions. Corruption is commonly recognised as a major ‘social bad’, and is seriously harmful to society, in terms of the functioning and legitimacy of political-economic systems, and the day-to-day lives of individuals. There is nothing novel about bribes in brown envelopes and dubious backroom deals, ostensibly to grease the wheels of business. Corrupt practices like these go to the very heart of illicit transacting in both legal markets – such as kickbacks to facilitate contracts in international commerce – and illegal markets – such as payoffs to public officials to turn a blind eye to cross-border smuggling. Aside from the apparent pervasiveness and longevity of corruption in commercial enterprise, there is now renewed policy and operational attention on the phenomenon, prompting and meriting deeper analysis. Corruption in commercial enterprise, encompassing behaviours often associated with corporate and white-collar crime, and corruption in criminal commercial enterprise, where we see corruption central to organised crime activities, are major public policy issues. This collection gives us insight into their nature, organisation and governance, and how to respond most appropriately and effectively.

Nicholas Lord

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