Abstract
White-Collar crimes are especially difficult to investigate. In the United States, prosecutors, whose conduct is guided by the principle of opportunity, have a great discretion in order to force corporations to cooperate; moreover, corporations do not enjoy the same procedural rights as individuals. By contrast, in many European countries the principle of legality prevents prosecutors to negotiate agreements about bringing charges, and corporations are granted with the same procedural rights as indicted individuals. Consequently, substantial differences between the U.S. and European procedural systems may mean that corporate criminal liability, which is a useful tool in the United States, instead becomes an obstacle for criminal investigation in Europe.
This contribution has been made in developing of a Fellowship granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education “FPU” Research Program.
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Notes
- 1.
It is noteworthy the Supreme Court’s landmark 1909 decision in New York Central & Hudson River Railroad v. United States, 212 U.S. 481(1909).
- 2.
Buell (2007), p. 1658.
- 3.
Buell (2007), p. 1616.
- 4.
Diskant (2008), p. 131.
- 5.
Diskant (2008), p. 132.
- 6.
Buell (2007), p. 1616.
- 7.
201 U.S. 43 (1906).
- 8.
Id. at 75–76; see Braswell v. United States, 487 U.S. 99, 108–109 (1988) (explaining that the Fifth Amendment privilege does not apply to “collective entities”).
- 9.
Id. at 76.
- 10.
This is the approach adopted in Hale v. Henkel. And it is also adopted and deeply explained in Henning (1996), especially pp. 795ff.
- 11.
Bohrer and Trencher (2007), p. 1481.
- 12.
Bohrer and Trencher (2007), p. 1488.
- 13.
385 U.S. 493, 500 (1967).
- 14.
- 15.
Griffin (2007), pp. 365ff.
- 16.
Griffin (2007), p. 364.
- 17.
Griffin (2007), p. 360.
- 18.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan has issued two opinions finding rights violations based on governmental coercion of KPMG. See United States v. Stein (Stein I), 435 F. Supp. 2d 330 (S.D.N.Y. 2006); United States v. Stein (Stein II), 440 F. Supp. 2d 315 (S.D.N.Y. 2006). In the first (“Stein I”), the court held that the Thompson Memorandum’s suggestion—followed by prosecutors in the case—that cooperation could be judged by the corporation’s decision whether to pay the attorneys’ fees of its potentially culpable officers and employees improperly interfered with those targets’ Fifth Amendment right to due process and Sixth Amendment right to counsel. In the second opinion (“Stein II”), the court held that two of the proffering employees who had been threatened with termination of their jobs and payment of their legal fees if they did not make a statement to the government, made their statements under coercion attributable to the government, and their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination were violated. See Bharara (2007), pp. 24ff., especially p. 24.
- 19.
C-550/07 P—Akzo Nobel Chemicals and Akcros Chemicals v. Commission.
- 20.
Diskant (2008), p. 150.
- 21.
Diskant (2008), p. 175.
- 22.
Buell (2007), pp. 1622ff. The author explains this “distinctive setting of the firm”.
- 23.
Silber and Joannou (2006), p. 1240.
- 24.
Memorandum from Paul J. McNulty, Deputy Attorney Gen., U.S. Dep’t of Justice, to Heads of Department Components and U.S. Attorneys, Principles of Federal Prosecutions of Business Organizations (Dec. 12, 2006), available at http://www.justice.gov/dag/speeches/2006/mcnulty_memo.pdf (12.2.2014).
- 25.
Id. § VII (B) (3) at 11–12.
- 26.
Id. § VII (B) (2) at 10.
- 27.
Bohrer and Trencher (2007), p. 1488.
- 28.
Oesterle (2004), p. 476.
- 29.
Silber and Joannou (2006), p. 1230.
- 30.
Diskant (2008), p. 141. The author explain the role that entity criminal liability plays: “by charging both the corporation and the individuals, U.S. prosecutors rather artificially create codefendants, and as is so often the case in the U.S. system, one defendant can then be compelled to plead guilty and cooperate in the prosecution of a codefendant”.
- 31.
Bohrer and Trencher (2007), p. 1481.
- 32.
Gascón Inchausti (2012), p. 66, who asserts that legal person may be imputed or charged means it has to have all the rights that the law links to this procedural positions. See also Brodowski, in this volume, pp. 211ff.
- 33.
Bajo Fernández and Gómez-Jara Díez (2012), p. 283, the Spanish legislator has chosen to equate the procedural status of the individual accused and the legal person accused.
- 34.
- 35.
Royal Decree of September 14, 1882, approving the Spanish Criminal Procedure Act.
- 36.
Bajo Fernández and Gómez-Jara Díez (2012), pp. 283ff. In this point the wording of the law is clear. So, it does not give room for restrictive interpretation.
- 37.
Del Moral García (2010), pp. 739ff.
- 38.
Rulings of Spanish Constitutional Court 18/2005, February 1st and 68/2006, March 13th.
- 39.
In this sense see Funke v. France (Case A/256-A) European Court of Human Rights [1993] 1 CMLR 897 25 February 1993.
- 40.
Del Moral García (2010), p. 741.
- 41.
Maza Martín (2010), p. 8.
- 42.
Many European constitutional Courts and the European Court of Human Rights has said that you cannot appreciate the lack of cooperation as evidence of guilt, because the opposite would render meaningless the right not to testify.
- 43.
Article 554.4º LECrim—the Spanish Criminal Procedure Act—defines the domicile of legal entities as the physical space that constitutes the direction center, whether headquarter or dependent establishments, or such other places where may be found documents or other means of your daily life that are reserved to the knowledge of third parties.
- 44.
A further study can be seen in Bajo Fernández and Gómez-Jara Díez (2012), pp. 294ff.
- 45.
Directive 2005/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 October 2005 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purpose of money laundering and terrorist financing, OJEU 25.11.2005, L 309/15.
- 46.
Gómez-Jara Díez (2010), pp. 264f.
- 47.
Guidelines introduce strong incentives for managers to shift risks toward the lower echelons of the corporate hierarchy and leaders of the company with the company counsels’ aid denouncing employees just to save the corporation, Nieto Martín (2008), p. 207.
- 48.
Laufer (2006), pp. 137ff.
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Neira Pena, A.M. (2014). Corporate Criminal Liability: Tool or Obstacle to Prosecution?. In: Brodowski, D., Espinoza de los Monteros de la Parra, M., Tiedemann, K., Vogel, J. (eds) Regulating Corporate Criminal Liability. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05993-8_16
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