• Professor Liz Campbell, Francine McNiff Chair of Criminal Jurisprudence, Faculty of Law, Monash University, Australia
• Professor CK Low FCIS FCS, Associate Professor in Corporate Law, The Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School, Hong Kong (Moderator)

About the Course
 

Session 1 - Trying Corporate Actors – a Critique of Deferred Prosecution Agreements

Since their introduction and development in the United States, deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) have gained traction in various other jurisdictions, enabling prosecutors to enter into agreements with corporate actors to defer or suspend criminal proceedings, subject to adherence to certain conditions. In place on a statutory basis in the UK since 2013, and likely to be introduced in Australia this year, DPAs are seen as empowering the State to intervene and impose conditions on a suspected corporate actor for criminal behaviour, while permitting the entity to make reparation without the collateral damage of a conviction. DPAs are proposed as a quicker, cheaper, and more predictable option than the conventional criminal trial with its attendant costs, risks, and delays. The presenter submits that DPAs are both necessitated by but also misconstrued as a way of offsetting problems with corporate criminal liability. Moreover, and paradoxically, while DPAs are introduced in an effort to remedy such issues, they are deployed also so as to mitigate the inevitable consequences of conviction, that is, the “successful” use of corporate criminal liability. DPAs therefore both serve to supplement as well as dilute corporate criminal liability. Beyond this, the use of DPAs has implications for individual criminal liability, in addition to raising matters of coherence with civil liability mechanisms.

Session 2 - The Misuse of Corporate Vehicles: Concealing (and Revealing) Beneficial Ownership

Serious criminality often is enabled and enhanced by the use of legal structures like companies, trusts and partnerships to conceal the “beneficial ownership” of assets. Features of corporate opacity help to generate, conceal and maintain the resources necessary for many criminal relations and actions. Recognition of this phenomenon is stimulating various legal amendments at the domestic and transnational level, relating to the registration of ownership and the directorship of companies, in an effort to improve transparency and oversight and thus prevent and deter crime. Critical issues remain under-explored regarding these laws’ likely effectiveness, as well as their implications for human rights. This paper brings together insights from criminal law, company law and regulatory studies to provide a novel doctrinal and theoretical analysis of the key legal measures that seek to improve transparency and thereby reveal the beneficial ownership of assets implicated in serious crime.

Level: Intermediate
Language: English

For details and enrolment, please download the below flyer and send the completed enrolment form to The Law Society of Hong Kong. 

Joint Seminar - 12 March 2019 v1.pdf