Preventing fraud, corruption and bribery committed through legal entities for the purpose of financial and economic gain

Nov 1, 2011 - Dec 31, 2012

Project description

The main objective of this project is to contribute to the prevention of and fight against economic and financial crime committed through legal entities in the public and private sector. Legal persons can be deliberately established, or otherwise misused, for the purpose of financial and economic gain by means of fraud, corruption and bribery. Such organised malpractices, e.g. VAT fraud, are also often cross-border in nature and take advantage of opportunities offered by the European internal market. Consequently, the functioning of the internal market, the financial system of the EU and its Member States as well as their financial and fiscal interests, are being affected. Differences in civil, administrative and criminal laws and regulations of the Member States make it more difficult to tackle such cross-border malpractice. The application of preventive methods can enhance the effectiveness of tackling these phenomena. Improving exchange of information on legal entities by interconnecting business registers in the Member States is a perfect example of such a preventive strategy. See main project goals.

Topic

- increased knowledge among the authorities of the Member States of the EU and international regulations related to organised crime, fraud and corruption;
- improved understanding of the opportunities for the circumvention of those regulations misusing legal entities;
- insight into the possibilities for improvement of the afore mentioned rules and regulations and enhanced awareness of available best practices.

These results are achieved by respectively the following measures:
(a) participating in the International Conference in Warsaw;
(b) the production and dissemination of the reader;
(c) participation by government experts from the Member States in a meeting in The Hague for the preparation of the manual of best practices;
(d) the EU wide dissemination of the manual;
(e) the intensive involvement of the anti-corruption network

Objective

The main objective of this project is to promote preventive actions and strategies. To this end the following project activities will be undertaken: (1) conducting a comparative study on the implementation and application of international and EU legislation related to the prevention of and fight against crimes such as fraud, corruption and bribery committed by either legal entities and /or by their directors, including the exchange of information on disqualifications of persons entitled to legally binding those legal entities (cf. article 31 UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime); (2) establishing an inventory of best practices with respect to the prevention of such malpractices by those entities; (3) the convening of a conference in Warsaw, Poland of expert representatives from the Member States, from international stakeholders such as the OECD, FATF and the NGO Transparency International and from the EU anti-corruption network, on the results of the research and the survey; (4) the publishing of the comparative study with the results of the research and the outcome of the conference; (5) the publishing of a manual of best practices -such as the preventive screening of business sectors developed and successfully applied in the Netherlands- and horizontal tools in the prevention of bribery, corruption and other economic and financial crimes committed through legal entities in order to promote them at EU level.