Transnational Corporate Crime - Essay Example

The increasingly globalized nature of crime has made its impact more far reaching than it is conceived in ordinary course of life. The overall nature and sophistication with which white collar crimes are specially committed are considered as simply as amazing by any standards.(Carrabine, Ignaski & Lee, 2004). The corporate scandals that have come out in recent years are showing the level of sophistication and have further complicated the issue. It is also argued that the transnational organizations often tend to involve in activities which often can be classified as illegal in their home countries.

Such involvement in potentially illegal acts often results into significant social and economic problems also not only in the host countries of these transnational organizations. F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd – a Swiss Pharmaceutical giant is considered as the leading corporate criminal of 1990s.2 It was fined for approximately $500 million for leading a global conspiracy to artificially fixing prices and market shares for some of the vitamins that were being sold in US and elsewhere. Apart from this, it was also alleged that the company attempted to rig different bids placed by different companies for getting contracts for selling vitamins in US.

Most of the investigation for this took place within US i.e. Dallas and the overall period of investigation included the acts committed by the firm over the period of almost ten years. This literature review will provide an analysis of the existing literature on the transnational crimes and will further discuss the case of F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd to assess the regulatory response to such crimes, the investigation of the crime, its impact on the society and any outcome of any investigation that took place.

Differential association theory outlines the individual learning process which can typically explain the deviant