Legal notion and practice distinguish between natural persons and legal persons. Natural persons refer to human beings to whom criminal law attributes criminal responsibility for actions which violate norms, the breach of which would result in criminal sanctions.
Legal persons, on the other hand, are all those persons to which the law attributes a separate and distinct personality from the members who form that legal person. Such legal persons include companies, corporations and partnerships amongst others. However, this separate and distinct personality attributed to them is nothing more than a juridical personality endowed by statute, law or in terms of legal principles.
This notion of ‘Corporate Criminal Liability’ was introduced by virtue Act III of 2002, whereby an amendment was made to the Maltese Criminal Code and a new provision, namely Article 121D which laid down that certain offences which are committed for the benefit, in part or in whole, of the company, by the executive of the body corporate or other principle officers or any person having power of representation or authority in the decision making or the authority to exercise control within company, then the body corporate shall be liable to being punished.
The type of punishment to be imposed is financial in nature and this is precisely because a body corporate cannot be imprisoned. The fines are quite hefty and range from a minimum of not less than €20,000 and not more than €2 million.
Besides a pecuniary penalty, our legislator also introduced other sanctions which could be imposed on a body corporate if criminal liability results against it in the circumstances explained above. These sanctions include, the exclusion of that body corporate from being entitled to receive any public benefits or State Aid. Similarly, the Courts can impose a suspension or cancellation of any licence or permit that a body corporate has whereby it can engage in any trade, business or other commercial activity.
Another possible sanction for a body corporate found guilty of a criminal offence is that it can be placed under judicial supervision or indeed obliged to wind up. Furthermore, corporate criminal liability can result in the Courts ordering the closure of any premises, whether temporarily or permanently, which may have been used for the commission of the offence.
The array of offences to which corporate criminal liability applies are various and range from money laundering, drug trafficking, human trafficking, corruption, trading in influence amongst others. In today’s world, when we consider the enormous impact corporations have on our everyday lives, one cannot but agree that corporate criminal liability in proven cases of wrong doing is salutary.
