Book Description

"Over the last decade, many of the world's biggest companies have been embroiled in legal disputes over corruption, fraud, environmental damage, taxation issues, or sanction violations, ending either in convictions or settlements of record-breaking fines that have surpassed the billion-dollar mark. For critics of globalisation, this turn towards corporate accountability is a welcome change, showing that multinational companies are not above the law. In this book, Cornelia Woll considers how far this turn toward negotiated corporate justice, and the United States' legal action against multinationals in particular, is motivated by geopolitical and geoeconomic concerns. Woll analyses the evolution of corporate criminal prosecutions in the United States, as well as the extraterritorial expansion of its jurisdictions, and demonstrates a notable bias against foreign firms. In extreme cases, she argues, this type of legal action is used for explicitly strategic purposes to further US economic interests at home and abroad, a practice known as 'economic lawfare'. By studying the recent institutional and legal changes within a range of countries that have seen their multinational companies targeted by the threat of US prosecutions - including the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Brazil - Woll draws attention to the impact of this strategy in reshaping both national legal approaches to corporate criminal law and the protocols for business government relations. No government wishes to stand accused of allowing their own multinationals to get away with illegal or unethical practices that have only come to light via US investigations, nor do they wish to see the resulting fines from any legal proceedings paid out to the US justice system alone. Woll discusses the resulting measures taken, and those still needed, to strengthen national capacity to intervene in corporate misconduct cases, and considers the extent to which certain US actions exemplify the weaponisation of interdependence by a hegemonic power"--