Ensuring eSignature Lawfulness for Interview Non-Disclosure in European Union

How to eSign a document: e-signature lawfulness for Interview Non-Disclosure in European Union

the problems with having um fines only on firms is that it's the individuals within the firms that make the decision to form a cartel so you're punishing shareholders and the firm as a whole for what quite often is the actions of just a small minority of employees there are exceptions there are cases where cartels are approved and promoted throughout the firm but increasingly as firms are accepting that cartels are bad it's just rogue employees so because of the gap in the in time from when a cartel is detected and when fines are imposed which sometimes can be four or five years um by the time the fine is imposed individuals may not still work for the firm they may have moved on so one of the things i was arguing at this conference is that having sanctions against individuals such as the threat of imprisonment is actually going to go a lot further in deterring these kinds of actions than just imposing fines on firms some member states such as the uk ireland france actually have a statute a criminal code which concerns price-fixing and other cartel behavior other member states such as sweden germany belgium have specifically decided not to criminalize on the european level the european commission can only impose fines and undertakings it would require careful legislative change um for them to be able to impose any kind of criminal sanction on individuals and this creates a lot of problems um at the moment the european commission is only interested in fines on firms it's made it very clear that it doesn't want to explore sanctions against individuals but i would argue that really it should use the european competition network to create mechanisms whereby individual sanctions on the national level such as the criminal offence can complement cartel enforcement on the community level now the difficulty is of course that the uk and ireland risk becoming the de facto criminal prosecutors in that case and that obviously is unsatisfactory for all sorts of reasons but worldwide more and more jurisdictions are adopting criminal offences against cartels and i think the european union risks being left behind and more fundamentally there's something really wrong with there being more chance of being imprisoned for price fixing of say heating oil in galway in the west of ireland or for bid rigging in hamburg in germany but not for an international cartel which affects more than one member state those are the most serious infringements and they're the ones that should attract the most serious uh penalties i think very encouraging and certainly something that confirms a lot of the research we do at the university of east anglia everybody seems to agree that sanctions against individuals are a good idea in this audience we've had academics who've agreed we've had former prosecutors who've agreed and fundamentally we've had competition lawyers who represent the firms who've said that actually if i go to employees and say this could send you to jail unless you listen to me that's hugely helpful to their compliance training efforts discussion with competition authorities with academics is hugely helpful in thinking about how we can move forward at the moment i don't see any signs of a discussion of how individual sanctions can be used to complement eu cartel enforcement and i find that very troubling you