CPD >> Forthcoming ECPD Seminars |
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Title | Joint Seminars on “Trying Corporate Actors – A Critique of Deferred Prosecution Agreements” and “The Misuse of Corporate Vehicles: Concealing (and Revealing) Beneficial Ownership” (For enrolment, please contact The Law Society of Hong Kong) | ||||||
Date | 12 March 2019 | ||||||
Time | 10.00 am - 12.00 noon & 2.00 pm - 4.00 pm | ||||||
Venue | Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre, 38/F, Two Exchange Square, 8 Connaught Place, Central, Hong Kong | ||||||
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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.
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