ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates the thin line between advantageous but reasonable and proportionate corporate hospitality and lavish gifts which amount to proper bribes. It explores the uncertain boundaries between deliberate misselling and misrepresentation of financial products and financial practices which are rather the fruit of incompetence or of the inability to predict events that are outside the previously experienced range of outcomes in the complexity of financial systems. The book explains how the collusive relationships between politics and the press can undermine the efforts of responsibilisation and ethicisation of one of the paramount instruments of democracy: the press. It discusses the opportunity of introducing a new offence of match-fixing in sports to distinguish it from bribery so as to strengthen deterrence and minimise the risk of interpretative confusion which might hinder prosecution and conviction.
