Criminal Liability For Companies

Companies can be criminally liable for certain acts and omissions, under the Criminal Code.

Criminal liability for corporations has been introduced in order to avoid a situation where the individual offender within a company cannot be identified because of the its intricate management structures. It allows the company to be held liable whether or not one or more individuals are also held responsible for the same act.

In many jurisdictions, only individuals can be criminally liable; but there has been increasing pressure on member countries from the EU and OECD to extend the reach of criminal law to corporations, and an equal and opposite resistance to it from the corporate world.