Dangerous arms exports have been acknowledged as the substrate of many grievances globally, such as food deprivation, disease, disability, loss of education, sexual abuse, torture, and death. In an acknowledgement of this reality, European states have long sought to balance the human rights risks of arms transfers abroad with their exporting needs through the past decades via a series of legal and political frameworks. The politically binding European Code of Conduct on Arms exports became the legally binding Common Position on Arms exports, which in turn facilitated the birth of the global, UN sponsored Arms Trade Treaty.

This presentation seeks to explore how different European States have, through their own domestic legal frameworks, managed compliance, or noncompliance, with these supranational obligations. It will do so by examining what legal tools and procedures have been developed to do so, and which stakeholders are involved in shaping States behaviour and practice by looking closely at Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Drawing from qualitative, open-ended elite interviews, the role of civil society, industry and state-actors within a decision-making process characterized by widespread corruption, high secrecy and extremely limited public oversight will be discussed.

Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulators acknowledge that the reconstruction of the ultimate control over companies may be complicated, or even made impossible, in presence of complex ownership structures, opaque entities, or figureheads. Nonetheless, few studies have captured the attempt to conceal ownership through one of these means.
This paper addresses this gap by looking at the attempts of the Russian political and economic elite to avoid the sanctions issued by the EU in response to the invasion of Ukraine. In particular, the analysis identified all those companies, registered in Europe, which were directly – or indirectly – linked to the sanctioned Russian individuals until the days before the invasion of Ukraine, and described how their ultimate control over those companies evolved in consequence of the enaction of sanctions by the EU.
Preliminary results suggest that the changes in the ownership structure of European companies controlled by Russian individuals have been higher than the rest of European companies. And, that the companies under the control of the Russian elite are, tendentially, controlled by complex and opaque structures, often already alleged in offshore financial leaks reported by investigative journalism.
The analysis underlines the importance of an array of anomaly indicators in pointing European authorities in the right direction for unveiling the complex structures through which sanctioned individuals disguise their wealth ownership.

Worldwide, there is a growing interest in the relation between business and human rights. Increasingly, hard law and soft law requires corporations to conduct human rights due diligence and to prevent becoming involved in human rights abuses. Failing to do so creates real risks of civil and criminal liability of corporations and their executives. Since WWII, numerous corporations have been involved in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. However, in criminology, this particular form of corporate crime is understudied and poorly understood. This contribution explores risk factors and patterns that lead to corporate involvement in atrocity crimes. These include social and political characteristics of the country, where this involvement takes place, global contextual risk factors, and particular clusters of typical involvement. Our analyses are based on a data set with more than 150 cases of alleged corporate involvement spanning the time since 1945. This contribution analyses what type of corporations become involved in what type of atrocity crimes and in what ways, in which type of countries and contexts and in collaboration with what type of actors. In other words, this paper explores reoccurring patterns of corporate involvement in atrocity crimes and correlations between branches of industry, corporate structures, business activities and characteristics of the crimes.

Over the last two decades, the prevention of corporate crime has increased world-wide for multinational companies due to increased regulations not only in the U.S.. Almost all multinational companies now have elaborated formal compliance management systems. Many so-called “best practices” are being recommended by compliance officers, management consultants and other business-related actors for the prevention of different forms of corporate crime. However, against the background of large-scale scandals, it remains unclear as to whether these measures have any preventive effects or not. By carrying out 40 expert interviews and an intervention study concerning compliance trainings we found out what was rated as “best practices” of prevention and what effects compliance trainings had. The preliminary results imply that there are two models of doing compliance at work, and that in both, it is still difficult to address corporate crime in a preventive manner. Concerning trainings that were supposed to raise the awareness concerning corporate crimes, we found some immediate effects of the training, but don’t know how by now, how long these effects last.