The Importance Of Corporate Criminal Liability

CORPORATE CRIMINAL LIABILITY.

Introduction.

In the trending era of Globalization, we can see large corporations creating a magnanimous impact on the society. They seem to have become an integral part of the daily curriculum. Despite their huge advent, they also create a huge transformation in the developmental structure of the Country. But in concentrating between these subtle, the companies also hold a criminal disguise. Since Companies are not human entities, their behavior also remains extra-ordinary. It unlocks the logical structure of the Criminal Law. The reasonable doubts are beyond proving and the prosecutor needs a strong element to prove it as a principle of criminal liability. Very few crimes involve the principle of liability,

Corporate Entities could only be held liable for crimes which din’t require mens rea since mere existence of master-servant relationship was not a sufficient basis for imputing personal fault upon the master. There were three common law crimes which dint require mens rea- Public Nuisance, Criminal Liable and Contempt of Court and addition to that where mens rea was not required were regulatory offences created by statutes. In 1915, the House of Lords in a civil liability case entitled Lennard’s Carrying Co. Ltd. laid down a general principle for attributing fault to a corporation – the directing mind principle. Accoding to this principle,the acts and mind of certain senior officers of the corporation – the directing minds- are deemed to be the acts and state of mind of the corporation. It means that the directing minds are identified as the corporation, and thus the corporation is directly liable, rather than vicariously

The actual underlying principle of the identification theory is the detecting of a guilty mind and the recognition of the individual who will be identified as the company itself.

In Tesco Supermarket v/s Nastrass, The House of Lords held that “the manager was not a person of sufficiently important stature within the corporate structure to be identified as the company for this purpose, and since there had been due diligence at the level of top management, the company could use the defence. The metaphor used by Lord Denning in an earlier case was a reference in this decision:

A company may in many ways be likened to a human body. It has a brain and a nerve centre which controls what it does. It also has hands which hold the tools and act in accordance with directions from the centre. Some of the people in the company are mere servants and agents who are nothing more than hands to do the work and cannot be said to represent the directing mind and will of the company, and control what it does. The state of mind of these managers is the state of mind of the company and is treated by the law as such.”

The above stated case speaks of even the present day