G Wilson

Business, State, and Community: Responsible Risk Takers, New Labour, and the Governance of Corporate Business

In December 1998, Peter Mandelson MP, one of the principal architects of the Labour Party’s victory in the May 1997 general election, dramatically resigned as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. Nevertheless, despite his relatively brief period in that office, Mr. Mandelson left his imprint on policy through the publication in November 1998 of a major White Paper, ‘Our Competitive Future: Building the Knowledge Driven Economy’. The White Paper sets out the New Labour analysis of the national political economy in a globalized world economy and is very much influenced by Mr. Mandelson’s experience of the entrepreneurial spirit during his fact-finding visit to the United States of America. This article seeks to chart the relationship between New Labour’s desire to foster the development of the corporate sector within a vibrant entrepreneurial culture and the need to ensure that the integrity of the market is preserved in an arena which is seen as inimicable to strong regulatory intervention by the state. As well as mapping New Labour’s political rhetoric onto contemporary debates in corporate governance, the analysis will involve an examination of the interface between business practice and morality. In particular, the article will focus upon the role of the conception of company directors as ‘responsible risk takers’ and the upon the use of name-and-shame sanctions in the development of an entrepreneurial culture in which all corporate enterprises are seen as having a legitimate societal ‘licence to operate’.

The FSA, “credible deterrence”, and criminal enforcement – a “haphazard pursuit”?

Purpose – Located within growing scholarly interest in linking the global financial crisis with revelations of financial crime, this piece utilises Roman Tomasics suggestion that the financial crisis has marked something of a turning point in regulatory responses to financial crime worldwide. Tomasic attributes this to changing attitudes towards light-touch regulation and risk assessment, and the demand for existing agencies to be replaced with new tougher authorities. In the UK, this can be illustrated by the imminent replacement of the FSA with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Discussion of the FSAs financial crime fighting activity is an important forecast for the likely directional focus of the FCA in this regard. A focus only on “market abuse” enforcement within this arises on account of the effects for financial systems widely attributed to this activity, with threats to systemic stability being a hallmark of the 2007-2008...

Responsible risk takers: notions of directorial responsibility, past, present and future

This article has at its heart the current New Labour Governments notion of the director as a responsible risk-taker, but takes as its immediate focal point the proposals set out for consultation in the Insolvency Services 2000 paper, Bankruptcy: A Fresh Start, and their recent incorporation into the White Paper, Opportunity for All in a World of Change. Although focused principally on bankruptcy, the notions of respectability which may be said to underpin these measures at a fundamental level will also be examined through the prism of the mid-to-late nineteenth century case law and commentary surrounding the emergence of the modern corporate form. It will be suggested that there is a marked similarity between many of the concerns which were being aired at that time and those presently at issue, and that moreover the nineteenth century fraud trials in fact provide a much more profound discussion of the underlying issues than do the modern disqualification cases.

Is ‘This Time’ Really ‘Different’?: Reflections on ‘Risk’ in Financial Impropriety and Criminal Liability Past and Present in Looking to the Future

This chapter seeks to analyse the responses to the global financial crisis in the related fields of financial and white collar crime through the lens offered by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s well-known aphorism of ‘this time is different’ and Ulrich Beck’s classic study of risk. The chapter seeks to explore the rich and diverse perspectives that have been opened in the academic and policy literatures by ideas which underpin Reinhart and Rogoff’s analysis, and in particular to argue for the adoption of a long timeframe historical approach in order to illuminate the central role of risk and the complex societal and regulatory responses to risk in criminal regulatory responses to financial impropriety in the business context.