Deferred Prosecution Agreements in England & Wales: Castles Made of Sand?

Public Law, 2020, Apr, 307-330. Negotiated settlements are increasingly regarded as an alternative tool against corporate criminality, with numerous countries now embracing such settlements. In England and Wales, amidst concerns relating to corporate criminal liability, the government introduced deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) in 2014. Five years on from their introduction in England and Wales, it is timely to re-examine the DPA regime, not least given its influence on developments in other jurisdictions. This article examines three key aspects of the development of the DPA regime to date, that, we argue, have resulted in a weak foundational basis for the regime notwithstanding its robust legal framework. Specifically, we explore: whether a DPA is in the public interest; the requirement of self-reporting; and the terms of a DPA. Even though there are admittedly only five Agreements to date, it is nonetheless useful to reflect upon the lessons to be learnt from these infant years. While DPAs were enacted to overcome obstacles to prosecuting companies and they have been widely lauded, we are not convinced by such contentions. The argument advanced in this article is that practice has been haphazard, rather than tied to any core principles, and lacks a clear underlying purpose. This situation is particularly evident in the three areas discussed in this article, which leads to the conclusion that the DPA regime stands on shaky foundations

Understanding the organisational structure of fisheries crime in well-regulated fisheries

Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated (IUU) fishing is recognised as a global environmental, economic, and social problem, taking place in all kinds of fisheries. Preventing it is however difficult and there is a continuous need to expand the knowledge base on how the issue can be addressed. In this article we study fisheries crime from an environmental criminology approach by conducting a crime script analyses to describe the organisational structure of unreported fishing in a well-regulated fishery. The approach gives detailed insights into the different steps in the crime commission process in the Norwegian coastal cod fisheries. The crime script technique is expanded to also include an analysis of the regulatory framework designed to prevent illegal fishing activities. The main MCS mechanisms to prevent illegalities are present but the diversity in the industry makes the implementation of universal prevention mechanisms difficult. The analysis highlights the fisher-buyer dialogue and interactions prior to misreporting as a core aspect to the organisation of the violations, and difficult to regulate. When linking regulations and guardianship to different steps of the crime we discuss the identified vulnerabilities in the resource control system and present some possible intervention points and prevention mechanisms to be considered by policymakers.publishedVersio

The Dynamics of Food Fraud: the interactions between criminal opportunity and market (dys)functionality in legitimate business

This article conceptualizes ‘food fraud’ by shifting analytical focus away from popular/policy conceptions foregrounding the centrality of organized crime towards understanding the factors that shape the organization of food frauds. We argue that food fraud, rather than being an ‘exogenous’ phenomenon perpetrated by externally organized (transnational) ‘criminal enterprise’, is better understood as an ‘endogenous’ phenomenon within the food system where legitimate occupational actors and organizations are in some way necessarily involved. Criminal opportunities arise under conducive conditions as part of legitimate actors’ routine behaviours. Our contention is that the common definition of food fraud is too prescriptive and fails to allow space to understand the role of different actors and their motivations. We analyse a case study in soft drinks, presenting the necessary role of legitimate, occupational actors within/between legitimate organizational settings and markets, and demonstrate how criminal behaviours can be concealed and disguised within ‘ready-made’ market and business structures. </jats:p

Real-Time RGB-D Camera Pose Estimation in Novel Scenes using a Relocalisation Cascade

Camera pose estimation is an important problem in computer vision. Common techniques either match the current image against keyframes with known poses, directly regress the pose, or establish correspondences between keypoints in the image and points in the scene to estimate the pose. In recent years, regression forests have become a popular alternative to establish such correspondences. They achieve accurate results, but have traditionally needed to be trained offline on the target scene, preventing relocalisation in new environments. Recently, we showed how to circumvent this limitation by adapting a pre-trained forest to a new scene on the fly. The adapted forests achieved relocalisation performance that was on par with that of offline forests, and our approach was able to estimate the camera pose in close to real time. In this paper, we present an extension of this work that achieves significantly better relocalisation performance whilst running fully in real time. To achieve this, we make several changes to the original approach: (i) instead of accepting the camera pose hypothesis without question, we make it possible to score the final few hypotheses using a geometric approach and select the most promising; (ii) we chain several instantiations of our relocaliser together in a cascade, allowing us to try faster but less accurate relocalisation first, only falling back to slower, more accurate relocalisation as necessary; and (iii) we tune the parameters of our cascade to achieve effective overall performance. These changes allow us to significantly improve upon the performance our original state-of-the-art method was able to achieve on the well-known 7-Scenes and Stanford 4 Scenes benchmarks. As additional contributions, we present a way of visualising the internal behaviour of our forests and show how to entirely circumvent the need to pre-train a forest on a generic scene.Comment: Tommaso Cavallari, Stuart Golodetz, Nicholas Lord and Julien Valentin assert joint first authorshi

Regulating transnational corporate bribery in the UK and Germany

Large-scale cases involving multi-national corporations such as the BAE Systems and Siemens bribery scandals illustrate the complex organisation of such serious trans-national and multi-jurisdictional crimes. Sovereign states that do not have an active enforcement stance against transnational bribery are facing intense criticism from ‘moral entrepreneurs’ such as international and intergovernmental anti-corruption bodies. However, the regulation of such crimes faces a key contradiction: as business transactions become more global, enforcement and regulation remain at the local and national level. In short, national authorities are pressured to respond to trans-national corporate bribery using inter-national frameworks for enforcement. This thesis imports regulatory concepts to understand the variety of enforcement (e.g. criminal prosecution, civil sanctioning) and non-enforcement (e.g. self-regulation, accommodation) practices that help explain policy responses to transnational bribery. Comparing these responses in Germany and the UK is a useful empirical focus for examining the strengths and limitations of national enforcement approaches given both jurisdictions inhabit similar institutional contexts for corporate bribery e.g. relatively strong western European economies, fellow members of the EU/G8, subject to international conventions. The research incorporated a qualitative, comparative research strategy that involved semi-structured interviews, participant observation and bilingual document analysis. The research found that despite significant differences (e.g. centralised or decentralised systems, existence of corporate criminal liability, legal cultures), both UK and German anti-corruption authorities (i) face similar difficulties in enforcement as they are limited by their national jurisdictional boundaries and face several procedural, evidential, legal, financial and structural obstacles but (ii) are converging towards similar prosecution policies (e.g. negotiation of civil settlements for corporations). However, in both cases, evidence suggests enforcement and emerging self-regulatory practices are limited in relation to the anti-corruption actors’ own estimation of the problem. Therefore, (iii) the default position of the response is an accommodation of corporate bribery, even where the will to enforce is high.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Economic crime, economic criminology, and serious crimes for economic gain: On the conceptual and disciplinary (dis)order of the object of study

This article has two main objectives. First, to interrogate the concept and/or conception of ‘economic crime’ (framed as a singular thing). We argue that current policy, and subsequently, social scientific (or criminological more specifically) framings, tend to arbitrarily ‘carve up’ the objects of study that interest us, in turn creating a ‘conceptual disorder’ that has implications for how we explain, and respond to, these harmful crimes. This raises questions about the value of the concept of ‘economic crime’ and about the related process of conceptual abstraction. In analytical terms, we argue that more can be gained by focusing on the necessary and contingent relations of serious crimes for economic gain. Second, to scrutinise the logic of ‘economic criminology’ (framed in terms of a singular discipline) and assess the value that criminology can add to analyses of related behaviours. Notwithstanding the journal’s aim to create a sub-field of ‘economic criminology’, we argue that research into the nature, organisation and control of serious crimes for economic gain ought to begin from the perspective of how we can create integrative, collaborative or multi-dimensional accounts of these behaviours in order to better organise, and identify, the most plausible explanations and interventions. To this end, we explore different ways of working interdisciplinarily, considering the underlying logic and/or rationale for doing so