By Nick Robins

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But the Company’s takeover of much of India was achieved by force and fraud; in China, the battering ram was opium. The East India Company’s corruption and violence shocked its contemporaries and still reverberates today. The Corporation That Changed the World is the first book to examine the Company’s enduring legacy as a corporation. It uncovers the factors that drove it to excess and eventual collapse. This expanded edition looks at recent activist and cultural responses to the Company in China and India, and the corporate reform agenda in light of the economic crisis. In his account of the Company's story Robins highlights enduring lessons on how to make global business accountable. This will be vital reading for students and academics in economics and history.

London: Pluto Press, 2012. 281p.

By Kathryn Westmore

It has long been difficult for prosecutors in the UK to hold corporates to account for criminal behaviour and, in particular, for economic crime-related misconduct. The ‘identification doctrine’ requires that only the acts of the person who represents the company’s ‘directing mind and will’ can be attributed to a company. At the same time, it is recognised that there are certain types of criminal behaviour that can only be carried out within a corporate structure, and which are carried out for the benefit of that corporate entity. Therefore, it is inherently problematic that it is difficult to bring corporate criminal prosecutions. The introduction of ‘failure to prevent’ offences are an attempt to overcome these difficulties. The basis of a failure to prevent offence is simple – to have any defence, an organisation needs to prove that it had ‘reasonable’ or ‘adequate’ procedures in place to prevent an individual associated with it from carrying out a criminal activity. The first failure to prevent offence was introduced in relation to bribery in 2010; two further failure to prevent offences followed in the Criminal Finances Act 2017 related to the facilitation of tax evasion....  

London:  Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI), 2022. 19P.

By John Braithwaite

This study considers the nature of and ways to counter corporate crime, particularly within the pharmaceutical industry.

Results are presented of interviews with 131 executives in the pharmaceutical industry; interviews were conducted in the United States, Australia, Mexico, Guatemala, and the United Kingdom. Questionable payments disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1970's by U.S. pharmaceutical companies -- including American Home Products, Pfizer, Upjohn, Revlon, Dow, Syntex, and Bristol-Myers -- are discussed. Fraud in the testing of drugs and criminal negligence in the manufacture of drugs are addressed, and drugs such as thalidomide, which resulted in the deaths and deformations of more than 8,000 children, and MER/29, which was taken by an estimated 300,000 Americans and caused side effects including baldness, skin damage, and eye damage, are examined. The various ways that pharmaceutical transnational corporations defy the intent of laws regulating the safety of drugs by bribery, false advertising, fraud in the safety testing of drugs, unsafe manufacturing processes, smuggling, and international law evasion strategies are explored. That third world countries are special victims of the global law evasion strategies of transnationals is emphasized. Strategies for controlling corporate crime are suggested, and three subgoals are outlined for achieving a reduction in corporate crime: (1) deterrence -- both specific (against offenders) and general (against those who witness the sanctioning of others) -- can be effective; (2) the law can effectively impose rehabilitation on corporate offenders; and (3) the law can readily require restitution to victims of corporate crime and reparation to the community.

London; New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984 446p.