Schoenherr's Compliance and White Collar Crime Team

As businesses become larger, more complex and more international, new threats may appear, often in unfamiliar areas. Consequently, for companies, preventive measures, corporate criminal proceedings and investigations have markedly gained in importance.

 

Criminal compliance

The prevention of criminal offences committed by a company and/or its employees has become a key management task. The team therefore offers criminal prevention advice in the field of criminal compliance. It provides risk analyses of corporate areas fraught with risk and creates individual, tailor-made compliance programmes.

 

Recent relevant experience includes: the creation and provision of anti-corruption compliance programmes, including the training and setting up of behavioural guidelines and monitoring systems for companies; the creation and setting up of whistle blowing hotlines for national and international companies; and criminal compliance advice to a media company regarding Austrian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Serbian and Romanian law.

 

Here, the team’s lawyers can also rely on the firm’s compliance specialists in the fields of cartel, data protection, capital markets, labour, tax and corporate law.

 

White collar crime

The team also advises companies that have been damaged by the criminal activities of their employees or third persons. Additionally, it represents companies facing criminal liability due to organisational culpability or erroneous management decisions.

 

Schoenherr’s white collar crime lawyers help clients protect their rights and advise on how they can mitigate their risks accordingly, e.g. with regard to search warrants, confiscation of evidence, information regarding bank accounts and bank transactions, blocking of accounts and telephone surveillance.

 

The team also helps clients defend against coercive sanctions sought by the Public Prosecutor.

The white collar crime practice deals particularly with:

• Anti-Corruption
• Financial criminal law
• Crimes against property
• Insider trading
• Money laundering
• Accounting fraud
• Insolvency crimes
• Environmental criminal law
• Data protection
• Breach of professional secrecy
• Criminal offences concerning the media

 

Recent relevant mandates include: anti-corruption advice to an energy company regarding Slovenian private and public anti-corruption laws; defence of an international automobile company in criminal proceedings based on allegations of corruption brought by Czech prosecutors; advice to a managing director in preliminary criminal proceedings on allegations of fraud and insolvency crimes; and workshops for the Romanian Office of the Public Prosecutor and the Economic Crime section regarding insider trading and market manipulation.