Search results

The purpose of this paper is to examine the scope of the legal responses to bribery and particularly foreign bribery in the global context. It identifies the corrosive effect of bribery and its negative effect on the economy, before turning to Australia’s mixed response to foreign bribery.

The paper is theoretical in nature as a review of policy, and the literature has been the main method used for analysis. Given the increasingly transnational and organised nature of foreign bribery, this paper adopts a comparative approach using Australia as the home base with some comparisons with the UK and the USA.

This paper finds that Australia’s response to foreign bribery is improving from a low base, and that this is recognised by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Further improvement could be expected if there were strong government leadership and coordination of law enforcement authorities, including the police, corporate regulators and corruption authorities at the Commonwealth, state and territory levels. This paper acknowledges the work of Australia’s unfinished Senate Foreign Bribery Inquiry, which is due to report by 30 June 2017.

This paper revisits the debate on bribery and the response of law enforcement, highlighting the importance of effective and coordinated law enforcement. The paper will provide background for those analysing the issues with foreign bribery and the solutions for law enforcement.

The paper enables the reader to gain insights into the problems and causes and effects of foreign bribery. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to, and facilitate, further analysis of the most effective way to deal with bribery and the legal response.

Australia's Financial Transaction Reports Act 1988 (Cth) set up reporting requirements designed inter alia to identify the money trail of the proceeds of criminal activities and tax evasion. It targets the cash economy, which has always provided scope for tax evasion and the financing and concealing of criminal activity, domestically and internationally. The Act was passed as a result of the findings of two Royal Commissions in the 1980s which found evidence of money laundering and the use of false‐name accounts with financial institutions. A number of laws were passed in 1987 attacking criminal activity through the prevention and detection of offences connected with the cash economy.

Laws regulating securities markets such as the Securities and Exchange Commission laws in the USA, the Financial Services and Markets Act 1999 (UK), the Australian Corporations Law and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission Act 1989 (Commonwealth) (hereafter ASIC Act) and their parallels around the world seek to achieve market integrity, investor confidence and an informed market as a result of disclosure of information relevant to the market. These laws should result in the efficient operation of the market and a competitive market. They aim to ensure that the market reflects the forces of genuine supply and demand, and that imperfections in the market such as fraud, or mismatch or non‐disclosure of information, are corrected.

Questions the cost effectiveness of Australia’s legislation after 9/11 to combat terrorism by forcing banks to disclose terrorism finance to law enforcement agencies, citing evidence from the USA as well as Australia. Contends that this legislation constitutes a breach of the traditional bank/customer confidence, and is anyway ineffective because it simply leads to a flood of data which is apparently impossible to interpret. Outlines the provisions of the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism Act 2002, and of the 40 Recommendations (2003) of the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering, and makes reference to the Tournier Case of 1928, which set out exceptions to the bank’s contractual duty of confidence.

Examines the status of regulation and protection of whistleblowers in Australia, focusing on intermediaries and their advisers in financial services. Outlines the ambivalence of the legal system as far as whistleblowers are concerned, and the considerable risks they take, with examples of victims; case law is scanty. Points out the limited nature of protection in specific legislation, which is limited to four states and the ACT; but finds some protection in financial services legislation, including the Corporations Act 2001, the Financial Transactions Reports Act 1988, the Proceeds of Crime Act 1987, and the Trade Practices Act 1974. Makes some recommendations for encouraging continued whistling in the interests of an informed market for financial services, and cites UK and US legislation for comparison.

In recent times, there has been some disquiet within certain sectors of the Singapore business community over the role of auditors in detecting corporate fraud. The cause of this concern can perhaps be attributed partly to the Barings collapse in February 1995 and the subsequent suggestions that the auditors of the Barings subsidiary in Singapore, Barings Futures Singapore Pte Ltd (BFS), may have been negligent in their audit work. More recently, in mid‐1996, a substantial locally listed company, Amcol Holdings Ltd (Amcol), was placed under judicial management amid rumours alleging possible misdeeds by senior executives and directors. The Amcol saga has, once again, focused some attention on the role of auditors and their duty to detect fraud in company accounts.

A unifying theme apparent at this year's Symposium was the need for balance when lifting the veil of bank secrecy: (1) the need to protect civil liberties versus the need to fight crime; (2) the bank's need to balance its role as policeman while furthering its commercial objectives; (3) the necessity of weighing international cooperation against the awareness that individual nations jealously guard their own legislative regime; (4) the dichotomy of technology that serves both to protect and penetrate secrecy; (5) the balance required when investigating crimes.

CSF Buxmont Academy operates eight school/day treatment programs that use restorative practices, which includes a culture in which restorative characterizes staff interaction with students, and staff-to-staff and student-to-student relationships as well. This chapter presents analyses of the outcome experiences from two waves of discharge cohorts: 919 students during school years 1999–2000 and 2000–2001 and 858 during 2001–2002 and 2002–2003. Outcome measures include program completion rates, changes in self-esteem and anti-social attitudes, and the relationship between the length of program participation and post-release recidivism rates after controlling for individual risk factors. Recidivism rates were significantly related to length of program participation.

One of the common law duties owed by the employer is his duty to take reasonable care for the safety of his employee. This common law duty is an implied term in the contract of employment and is therefore contractual in nature. Because of the difficulties which may arise in bringing an action in contract for breach of the employer's duty of care, the employee who has sustained injuries during the course of his employment (although he may sue either in contract of tort will normally bring a tort action.

In the UK there has been a shift over the last decade towards the setting of targets by commissioning or regulatory bodies so that health services provide improved levels of care. For mental health services this has occurred in three phases: phase one related to simple key performance indicators (for example collection of patients' diagnostic codes); phase two placed greater emphasis on more meaningful clinical outcome data; the third and most recent phase placed prominence on patient‐focused data collection. We report the development and preliminary findings of a piloting of a patient‐related outcome measure (PROM) and patient‐related experience measure (PREM) created specifically for older adult mental health services in Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust. PROMs/PREMs are in keeping with an increased focus on patients' experience of health care, the provision of quality services and various key policies such as the recent government white paper Equity and Excellence: Liberating the NHS.