Ioannis Rodopoulos

Enforcing Prudential Banking Regulations in the Eurozone: A Reading from the Viewpoint of Criminal Law

Although still in its infancy, the European Banking Union (EBU) can be considered as a milestone of the whole procedure of European integration until today. Amongst other innovations, the EBU includes a highly complex shared enforcement system where stricto sensu supervisory, investigatory and sanctioning powers are shared between European and national authorities. Nevertheless, despite its ostensible coherence, the EBU legal framework contains several unclear aspects that can prove problematic in terms of efficiency and dangerous in terms of legal security. After a descriptive overview of the enforcement-related aspects of this framework and an analysis of the normative interactions between these aspects and “hard core criminal law”, this article intends to examine the possibility of a more coherent enforcement framework, where criminal law could serve, not only as an enforcement tool itself, but also as a normative and epistemological paradigm for non-criminal punitive mechanisms.