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The European Union’s Whistleblower Directive (WBD), or formally the “Directive (EU) 2019/1937 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2019 on the protection of persons reporting infringements of Union law” seeks to establish a uniform standard for whistleblowing protection across member state jurisdictions. Considering the international reach of the directive, it inevitably confronts divergent national attitudes towards whistleblowing. This paper aims to examine various cultural attitudes which have contributed to the common understanding of whistleblowing, under the directive.

The rhetoric on whistleblowing from a combination of business and national cultures is examined herein. A focus is cast on the information technology sector, which has traditionally protected trade secrecy over whistleblowing, under the guise of protecting of innovation. Moreover, the juxtaposition of American and German employment culture is testimony to the discrepancy in national narratives.

The WBD is both a symptom and a yardstick of modern employment culture in Europe. There are crucial clashes with trade secrecy which the directive has not resolved as well as an acknowledgement of the paradigm of legal thought which the directive pushes.

By reference to both business and national culture, this paper highlights the heterogenous conception of whistleblowing which the directive aims to reconcile. Whilst a vast amount of literature has covered isolated criticism of the WBD, a wider lens has not been cast to consider the pervasive influence of specific aspects on business culture.

Whistleblowers are individuals who detect and report misconduct in an organization. They help to mitigate organizational misbehavior and resulting damages effectively and relatively quickly. Whistleblower protection has not been systematically required in the European Union (EU), leaving many large organizations unregulated. This study aims to get in-depth insights into how unregulated organizations design, handle and view whistleblowing with the advent of a novel EU Whistleblowing Directive.

The authors conducted 17 semistructured interviews with a diverse group of organizations headquartered in Germany and inductively analyzed them following Grounded Theory. Linking the Grounded Theory to the legal endogeneity model, they developed seven perspectives that help to explain how organizations view whistleblowing.

In trying to make sense of the role of whistleblowing in the organization’s governance, organizations and their managers assume different perspectives. These perspectives guide their approach to whistleblower protection in the context of evolving regulation with little regulatory guidance. Perspectives vary in the degree of supporting whistleblowing regulation, from viewing whistleblowing as a natural, everyday governance tool to denying it and fearing denunciation. Most organizations exhibit several perspectives.

Little is known about day-to-day whistleblowing practices from the perspective of organizations. The authors fill this research gap by providing initial evidence on how organizations approach whistleblowing and the EU Whistleblowing Directive. Identifying organizations’ perspectives may help us understand how ineffective or noncompliant whistleblowing systems emerge and how organizations can improve.

This study aims to illustrate how bribery and fake news in Eastern European countries can affect businesses across Europe. Countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia and Hungary represent sizeable and potential markets. Thanks to their European Union membership and low labor costs, these markets could offer many investment opportunities to international managers. Consequently, this study focuses on the challenge of corruption encountered by international managers and the necessary precautions before committing financial resources to these countries.

For this study, 10 informal interviews with presumed providers of illegal services were used to investigate the previously unexplored innovative research question. Informal interviews were conducted with individuals who can be assumed to have experience or knowledge in the field of corruption in multinational corporations.

The results show the potential impact of corruption on international managers in Eastern Europe.

This study contributes to the literature by examining two forms of corruption: bribing journalists to publish fake news to harm commercial rivals and bribing public officials to manufacture legal proceedings against business competitors. The following will also highlight how a corrupt judicial system can have implications abroad and what problems this may raise for mutual legal assistance.

The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the extent of protection available for whistleblowers in South African criminal cases.

This paper first provides a brief background of crime in South Africa and argues that the concept of the whistleblower is just a buss word or collective noun. The methodology of this paper consists of a literature review of whistleblowers and relevant laws that can be used to protect whistleblowers in South African criminal cases.

This paper concludes that the existing law as primarily contained in the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 provides appropriate protection for whistleblowers in South African criminal cases.

Whistleblowers provide information on criminal, civil and disciplinary wrongdoings. This study focuses on the protection of whistleblowers pursuant to mainly the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977.

The originality of this paper lies in the approach to the handling of whistleblowers in South African criminal cases. This is the first research done with the emphasis on the use of mainly the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 to protect whistleblowers in South African criminal cases. The contribution of the study is that, by using this approach, it can provide protection and save lives, and it may enhance the willingness of whistleblowers to blow the whistle, which will be beneficial to the community of South Africa as a whole.

Foreign whistleblowers are foreign citizens who help national enforcement authorities to sanction both foreign-based corporations and home-based corporations that engage in economic crime. This paper aims to investigate the expansion of US law in the area of transnational economic crime by discussing the case of foreign whistleblowers.

This paper has been developed from a literature review carried out as part of a wider study into policing international bribery.

This paper shows that extraterritorial application of US whistleblowing laws is part of a broad trend associated with extraterritorial enforcement of US anti-corruption statutes such as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The extraterritorial reach of the FCPA and other statutes allowed the USA to become the leader in sanctioning US corporations as well as non-US corporations for economic crime. In effect, some US enforcement practices have become the standard that has influenced law and law enforcement in other countries as well as internal compliance of corporations.

In spite of the profound impact foreign whistleblowing has on the effectiveness of national anti-corruption enforcement, this topic has been largely neglected by academic research. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to provide an overview of the role of foreign whistleblowers and the significant impact foreign whistleblowing has for legal reform in European countries and internal compliance of corporations in Europe and beyond.

This study aims to examine how auditors perceive the influence of crucial fraud prevention factors in deterring financial statement fraud within the corporate sector. Additionally, this research explores the mediating effect of fraud awareness in elucidating the impact of ethical leadership and internal control systems on preventing financial statement fraud.

The study used an online survey, targeting a sample of 141 professionally qualified auditors with at least one year of practical experience in the field. The researchers used “Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)” to examine relationships between latent variables using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The study investigated the impact of whistleblowing systems, fraud awareness, ethical leadership, internal control systems and corporate governance on fraud prevention.

This research finding provides evidence to the corporate sector by establishing the significance of fraud awareness as the most influencing factor in preventing financial statement fraud. Furthermore, the combined explanatory variables account for 77.4% of the overall variance in financial statement fraud prevention. The study reveals a partial mediation effect of fraud awareness on the relationship between the internal control system and financial statement fraud prevention.

This research finding may assist in developing an effective fraud prevention programme to mitigate fraud instances and improve financial reporting quality. In the corporate sector, each organisation should clearly specify the policies on whistleblowing systems, fraud awareness training, internal control systems and corporate governance. To foster a comprehensive fraud prevention programme, the leaders should enforce these policies with employee support.

This research integrated crucial elements to develop a new theoretical framework for investigating financial statement fraud prevention within the corporate context. Accordingly, this research framework provides a more in-depth explanation of preventing financial statement fraud from an auditor’s perspective. Additionally, this research is the first to explore the mediating role of fraud awareness in influencing the effectiveness of the internal control system in preventing financial statement fraud.

This study aims to evaluate and investigate the existing process of establishing a banking relationship with politically exposed persons.

This study used qualitative techniques of semi-structured interviews with senior compliance officers of financial institutes in Pakistan.

This study found that the existing mechanism of identification and verification of politically exposed persons (PEPs) is ineffective. Financial institutes face challenges like the quality of name screening data sets, cost of identification and verification, role and control of the regulator, the influence of politically exposed persons, the opaqueness of laws and international connections of the politically exposed persons. Further, financial Institutes are burdened by regulators to perform robust PEP customer due diligence but do not guide and provide the right tools.

This paper aims to find challenges faced by financial institutes before onboarding the PEPs. Further, very limited studies on this topic have been conducted in Pakistani context.

With 43.2 million coronavirus cases and 525,000 deaths in 2022, India ranked second worldwide, after the United States (84.6 million cases and 1 million deaths), according to the latest available June 2022 COVID-19 impact data.

Amid people’s growing mistrust in the government, India’s news media enhanced the nation’s distinguished designation as the world’s largest and most populous democracy. India’s news media inform, educate, empower, and entertain a surging population of 1.4 billion people, which is roughly one-sixth of the world’s people.

Drawing upon the media agendamelding theoretical framework, we conducted a case study research into interplay between two prominent democratic institutions, the media and the government, to analyze the role of the COVID-19 pandemic in redefining India’s networked society.

India’s COVID-19 pandemic aggravated internecine tensions between media and government relating to four key freedom issues: (1) world’s largest COVID-19 lockdown affecting 1.3 billion Indians from March 25, 2020 to August 2020 with extensions and five-phased re-openings, to restrict the spread of COVID-19; (2) Internet shutdowns; (3) media censorship during the 1975–1977 “Emergency”; and (4) unabated murders of journalists in India.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused deleterious problems debilitating the tensions between the media and the government, India’s journalists thrived by speaking truth to power. This study delineates key aspects of India’s media agendamelding that explicates how the people of India form their media agendas. India’s news audiences meld media messages from newspapers, television, and social media to form a picture of the issues, insights, and ideas that define their lives and times in the 21st century digital age.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nuances of the consequences of greenwashing in the consumer and financial markets. Greenwashing is discussed frequently but in very abstract terms. Hence, a closer examination of the palpable consequences elucidates the ripple effects of this widespread phenomenon.

Focal points are the concept of green marketing, the stigmatization of corporations in the media and the regulatory consequences of greenwashing behaviour across consumer and financial markets. The two markets are paralleled in order to trace the novelties as well as the points of commonality in greenwashing.

The current consequences are an insufficient deterrence in both markets. The regulatory trend in both markets is leaning towards more stringent and punitive measures, which will likely affect the efficacy of the deterrence factor.

The influence on consumer perception is identified both as a motivating factor for greenwashing and as one of the most immediate elements which is negatively influenced by its exposition. In addition to the fact that greenwashing practices are common across the two markets, this paper identifies that a systemic deterioration of investor trusts significantly compromises the potential of sustainable finance and impacts investment in the financial market, mirrored in the negative consequences on consumer reactions to greenwashed products.