In the flurry of activity following the announcement of the 2017 general election, several bills were rushed through before the end of the parliamentary session. One of these was the Criminal Finances Bill, which meant that debates on its contents had to be curtailed.
A recent Workshop on Brexit Strategies for British & European Civil Society Organisations, organised by University of Exeter Business School in collaboration with CORE Coalition and the European Coalition for Corporate Justice has shed light into the potential implications of Brexit for the non-profit sector.
Following news last week that it has delayed the clean-up of oil spills in the Niger Delta, multinational giant Shell is now embroiled in what campaigners are calling one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the oil sector.
Corporate criminal liability reform and a proposed new offence of ‘failure to prevent economic crime’ were debated in the House of Lords yesterday (3 April), during the Criminal Finances Bill second Committee day. You can read the Hansard here.
CORE welcomes call from Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights for laws to prevent child labour and other abuses linked to British companies.
It’s day two of Committee Stage in the House of Lords. This involves detailed line by line examination of the separate parts of the bill. As a reminder, the bill will create a new corporate offence of ‘failure to prevent tax evasion’, extending the ‘failure to prevent’ model in the UK Bribery Act 2010 to corporate tax evasion, although there is some question over what, if any, differences there are between ‘adequate procedures’ as specified by the Bribery Act and ‘reasonable procedures’ as specified in the new failure to prevent facilitation of tax evasion offence.
Supermarket chain Tesco escapes prosecution and pays a £129m fine and £85m in compensation to shareholders over 2014’s accounting scandal.
Global risk analyst Verisk Maplecroft has published its annual Human Rights Outlook report, outlining ten human rights risks impacting business in 2017. Verisk notes that modern slavery risks are set to increase as the United States toughens its immigration policy, pushing countless undocumented migrants further underground and exposing them to greater exploitation.
Last week (8 March) cross-party Peers debated much needed legal reform to tackle widespread corruption and human rights abuses committed by multi-national corporations.
