Commercial criminal law

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Commercial criminal law is the collective term for all penal provisions that criminalize economic offenses. It is the state's response to white-collar crime . It serves to protect the structure of the economic constitution .

While only a few specialists were familiar with the subject of white-collar crime, and even the vocabulary, well into the 1980s, and there were hardly any treatises on it, the term has been used with increasing intensity in jurisprudence, legal reality and the public since the early 1990s .

The term "commercial criminal law" is not defined by law . Whether a provision is content-wise commercial criminal law ultimately results from its protective purpose. If it is intended to protect core areas of commercial law or if it can only be used for this purpose, it is "commercial criminal law".

The first commercial criminal law of 1949 listed the current commercial criminal law and, by introducing administrative offenses instead of criminal offenses, reduced the influence of the administrative authorities, in whose hands so far the management of the economy through regulatory penalties was often in the hands. The matter regulated by this law and its immediate successors (currently the Commercial Criminal Law 1954 (WiStrG 1954)) includes price regulation (e.g. excessive rent), usury and market regulation . Its practical importance is small.

In § 74c Judicature Act jurisdiction is economic Trial Chamber at a regional court regulated. There the group of criminal norms is named, which belong to the area of ​​responsibility of the Economic Criminal Chamber. The regulation determines which offenses have to be tried before a judicial body with special knowledge of economic processes and regulations because of the special relationship to economic life. The catalog is extensive, but does not describe the core area. This lies primarily in the following:

In some federal states (Baden-Württemberg at the public prosecutor's offices in Mannheim and Stuttgart, Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia) special units of the public prosecutor's office, the so-called priority public prosecutor's offices, have been created to combat these areas in particular .

Spectacular individual cases (e.g. FlowTex , Jürgen Schneider , Mannesmann trial , VW corruption affair ) show that the damage caused by economic crimes can be immense. It should be characteristic of white-collar crime, as criminological studies show, that there is a large dark field and a large number of the offenses are not cleared up.

The Corporate Criminal Law deals with the criminal liability of legal persons and persons associations.

literature

  • Marcus Böttger (Ed.): Commercial criminal law in practice . ZAP Verlag, 2nd edition, Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-89655-757-5 .
  • Hans Achenbach , Andreas Ransiek , Thomas Rönnau: Manual of commercial criminal law . CF Müller, 5th edition, Heidelberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-8114-4618-2 .
  • Christian Caracas: Responsibility in international corporate structures according to Section 130 OWiG - Using the example of bribery in business transactions with no punishments abroad, Nomos Verlag, Baden-Baden 2014, ISBN 978-3-8487-0992-2 ders. Corporate Compliance Journal 2015, p. 167 ff., 218 ff. And Corporate Compliance Zeitschrift 2016, p. 44 ff.
  • Hans Achenbach: From the case law on commercial criminal law published in 2013/2014 , NStZ 12/2014, 695.
  • Christian Müller-Gugenberger (Ed.): Commercial criminal law, manual of commercial criminal and administrative offense law . Dr. Otto Schmidt, 6th edition, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-504-40042-2 .
  • Tonio Walter: Sanctions in Commercial Criminal Law , Legal Worksheets (JA) 2011, 481 ( PDF, 172 kB ).

Web links