ABSTRACT
The financial and economic crisis has hit Spain unexpectedly hard since 2007, and also brought to light a continuum of bad practices and wrongdoing by politicians and business leaders. In this chapter I address the most widespread form of corporate crime before and during the Spanish crisis as a case study – the mortgage lending concession to benefit banks and other corporations involved in this form of accumulation by financial dispossession. In so doing, I draw some lessons from Frank Pearce’s Crimes of the Powerful as I focus attention on the specific regime of power that arises from the financialization of the economy as a political process. Thus I reveal how corporate crime is not a pathology of the system, but just another mechanism to accumulate capital. In short, this chapter examines the social agreement that conceals corporate power and the structure of impunity that fosters the crimes of the powerful as an outcome and a means to further concentrate class power.
