On 14 October 2015, Dr José Ramón Agustina, head of the Criminal Law department of the Faculty of Law, gave a session as part of the seminars organised by the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia (OAC) dealing with fraud prevention strategies in the private sector. The seminars formed part of the European project “Reducing corruption: focusing on private sector corruption”.
The criminal lawyer, who specifically specialises in crimes committed within organisations, explained how the crime prevention compliance programmes being developed by companies have gone beyond being recommendable to becoming essential tools for the whole company. As Agustina went on to point out, the Penal Code holds corporate entities responsible for the crimes committed under the auspices of the organisation including its executives and its employees.
Paraphrasing the popular saying that 'opportunity makes the thief', the professor stressed: 'the company can be sanctioned for having permitted or overlooked that opportunity and someone within their organisation can take advantage of that to carry out illegal acts'.
The European project of which all this forms a part is coordinated by the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Estonia and is supported by institutions from other member states such as the Danish Prosecution Service, the Corruption Prevention and Combating Bureau of Latvia and the OAC itself.
Amongst its objectives is to gather information on the extent and nature of private corruption through sociological studies and by contributing data to the European report on the fight against corruption. The aim of this is to identify the sectors most vulnerable to this type of crime.
The project is aimed at judges, state security organisations and forces, the staff of anti-corruption and scientific agencies in the sociological field and experts from the private sector.
