Glyn Davies – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Attorney General

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Glyn Davies on 2016-05-23.

To ask the Attorney General, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of introducing a new criminal offence of failure to prevent economic crime on the number of prosecutions for such crimes.

Jeremy Wright

Under existing law, a company only faces criminal liability if prosecutors can prove a sufficiently senior person knew about the criminal conduct. It can be extremely hard to prove this, especially in large companies with complex management structures.

A new failure to prevent offence could help prosecutors hold all companies to account for criminal conduct and bring some positive changes in corporate culture.