ABSTRACT
Corporate liability for criminal acts is an area of law that has received significant attention from the legislature in the United Kingdom in recent years. Currently, where an offence requires proof of mens rea, the law has sought to identify who is the controlling mind and then attribute his or her acts to the company. The failings of the identification principle are well documented; commentators have called it ‘deficient’ and ‘inadequate’ particularly in relation to larger corporations that have sophisticated managerial structures. As a result, the UK legislature has attempted to introduce an alternative form of liability through an omissions-based offence. The ‘failure to prevent’ model has been developed in two specific areas – namely, bribery and tax evasion. The intention of this chapter is twofold. First, it will critically examine the viability of the failure to prevent offence and the benefits of omissions-based offences in corporate criminal liability. Subsequently, the chapter will offer an argument for the expansion of the offence to other areas of financial crime, in particular, money laundering offences. Whilst rejected in debates prior to the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018, this chapter argues that the implementation of an offence of failure to prevent money laundering would offer significant advantages in combatting economic crime.
