Jeremy Wright told the Cambridge Symposium on Economic Crime that prosecutions under the Bribery Act had encouraged better governance within corporations and that this was something the government would seek to encourage through additional ‘failure to prevent’ offences.

This was necessary because the existing identification doctrine, under which corporate liability for crime is determined, makes it difficult to attribute criminal liability to large corporations where it is not possible to show a ‘controlling mind’, he said. 

Consultation

He added that the government would soon be consulting on plans revealed earlier this year to extend the scope of the ‘failure to prevent’ criminal offence beyond tax evasion and bribery to other crimes including money laundering, false accounting and fraud.

Source: Law Society Gazette