Kenny Thomas is an old friend who writes a column called Middle Class Political Economist in the USA. He shared this post with me recently and gave me permission to reproduce it here, which I do because I think that the new tool that he refers to in it might well be of use to come readers of this blog:
My colleagues at Good Jobs First have created a new database to track company regulatory violations in the United Kingdom. Violation Tracker UK joins the domestic US Violation Tracker as a way for a variety of users to track down information on corporate misdeeds dating back to 2010 in most cases.
“We hope that Violation Tracker UK will, like its U.S. counterpart, be helpful to a wide range of users, especially those seeking to reform corporate behavior,” said Good Jobs First Research Director Philip Mattera, who leads the work on the database.
The free tool allows users to search by company (with parents matched to subsidiaries), headquarters nation, type of offense, amount of fines, regulatory agency involved, etc. It lets researchers get a rapid overview of the determinations of over 40 agencies.
Some highlights: The largest amount of fines, £4.5 billion, has been levied in the financial service industry. Aerospace firms (mainly Airbus) accounted for £1.6 billion in penalties and telecommunications (primarily the now-defunct Nortel) came in at £1.2 billion.
Competition related violations account for £5.2 billion in fines, and £2.8 billion have been assessed for financial offenses. Good Jobs First points out that due to heavy use of warnings rather than financial penalties, health (£413 million) and environmental (£312 million) violations have been much less heavily penalized.
UK readers in particular, check out Violation Tracker UK! Its predecessors, Subsidy Tracker and Violation Tracker, have been used in the statistical analyses of more than 40 academic papers or Ph.D. dissertations worldwide. You will find high-quality data at your fingertips, and a way to help keep track of corporate scofflaws.
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So what we can say is that contemporary companies see lawbreaking part of their operations and as a bona fide cost of operations and budget accordingly.
That is indeed a sad state of affairs isn’t it?
Very interesting, and useful! I put a company name into the Violation Tracker UK and it found three violations.
I’ve been looking into this company, which is said to own a fishing boat that is currently in the news. Suffice it to say that there appear to be no directors, and no beneficial owners of shares, in the UK. All the shareholdings appear to be with overseas (Canadian) financial institutions. What does this mean?
I don’t know as I have not looked
The boat is owned by Macduff Shellfish, which is owned by Clearwater of Canada, which has now been taken over by two other companies, I see. I don’t know if that is significant, but I suspect that the whole incident has been in some way engineered by Lord Frost or Number 10, as some sort of lever or ploy to use involving this fishing deal, or some other trade deal with the EU. Cynical, moi?
Hi Ade.
I suspect the takeover may well be significant, as noted in the company accounts for the year ended 31 Dec 2019. The accounts are dated 5 Jan 2021, presumably just beyond the Covid filing extension date, when they were clearly aware of the prospective takeover deal. Large amounts of financial support are noted, and they say (as they must) that they can’t guarantee this would continue if the takeover occurs, and that this may affect the company as a going concern.
A *large* number of Charges have since been filed involving the boats and fishing licences.
This new research tool may come in useful for those looking into the Greenspill/Cameron and the Aquind/Kwarteng cases.