The wealthy white‐collar criminals: corporations as offenders

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to map out the corporate criminality among the 70 top‐ranked corporations in the Swedish business world. It aims to identify properties common for companies that get a decision by a regulatory agency and which kind of properties there are when the regulatory agency goes to a decision. Design/methodology/approach - Data on decisions taken against violation (criminal, civil, or administrative) collected from annual reports (1999‐2008) presented on the internet by eight regulatory agencies in Sweden. The corporations collected by the internet site “largest companies” and the Swedish business magazineAffärsvärlden(World of Business). The analysis of data were worked out by cross tab, designed as analysis of covariation between one independent variable to one dependent variable, or two or more independent variables (were one or more of them were held invariant to each other) to one dependent variable. Findings - Approximately, 60 companies (85.7 per cent) had at least one decision against them during the period 1999‐2008, and 28 companies had more than five decisions (court, administrative law, objection or settlement) against them, which means that 40 per cent of the whole sample performed a carrier criminality. Among the variables, low profitability, interior business, and to some degree, management control tend to covary with some or all kinds of decisions given by the regulatory agencies. Originality/value - The paper provides the field of white‐collar crime an investigation of corporations as offenders from the Swedish horizon. It provides regulatory agencies with a model of the causality behind the decisions against a corporation.