Ivar Kreuger : An International Swindler of Magnitude (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
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Match-fixing: The Current Discussion in Europe and the Case of The Netherlands
European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice, 2015
Match-fixing is a topic that captures the imagination of the public and increasingly attracts academic interest as well. Manipulation of sports games can be sports related, to achieve a better result for the team or a player, or gambling related to gain financially from the outcome. This paper describes the results of an empirical study of match-fixing in The Netherlands and analyses the main risk factors involved. These are social relations of persons involved in sports with criminals; the availability of the game for betting; financial difficulties of clubs, players and others who can influence the outcome of a match, and gambling addiction. Currently, match-fixing is high on the agenda of sports associations, gambling operators and government institutions on both the national and international levels. The ‘Convention on the manipulation of sports competitions’ drawn up by the Council of Europe encompasses a broad range of measures and can be viewed as the leading international in...
JOURNAL OF FINANCIAL CRIME, 2020
This study aims at investigating the phenomenon of financial crime with specific reference to the organization of major sporting events. In particular, in the light of the existing international regulatory framework and recent cases, the study highlights how the adoption of a “virtuous model” – from the point of view of transparency and legality – fully responds to the needs not only of the sports system itself but, also, and above all, of the entire international community.
Match-Fixing A Historical Perspective (1)
international journal of the history of sport 35, 2/3, 2018
Match-fixing has a long history, but while use of drugs in sport has a substantial secondary literature, match-fixing has only recently begun to attract the attention of historians. This essay begins with a brief overview of its global contemporary contexts, the broad range of sports where it now surfaces, increased recognition of its moral, social and economic threat, and the varied responses of leading sports organisations, legal gambling operators, police forces, governmental departments and regulators. The following section explores the challenges of finding any reliable evidence of match-fixing in the past. Such material can include reports of criminal trials and investigations, the decisions of national and international sporting bodies, journalistic investigations, players’ confessions, suspended investigations and the many various unsubstantiated allegations of fixing. An overview shows that match-fixing has been a major and substantial long-standing historical continuity in sport usually but not always linked to gambling and sporting materialism. Examples are brought forward to show that it could be found in Ancient Greece and Egypt, and was widespread across the early modern and modern periods in Britain, America or Australia. The essay concludes by suggesting some key questions which a future historical agenda for the study of match-fixing might address.
Fraud and Financial Scandals: A Historical Analysis of Opportunity and Impediment
SSRN Electronic Journal
The paper presents a conceptual framework of financial fraud based on the historical interaction of opportunity and impediment. In the long run the character of opportunity is determined by the technical characteristics of assets and their unique, unknowable or unverifiable features. Impediment is promoted by consensus about the real value of assets, such that through active governance processes, fraudulent deviations from real value can be easily monitored. Active governance requires individuals in positions of responsibility to exercise a duty of care beyond merely being honest themselves. Taking a long run historical perspective and reviewing a selection of British financial frauds and scandals, from the South Sea Bubble to the Global Financial Crisis, the paper notes the periodic occurrence of waves of opportunity and the evolutionary response of passive governance mechanisms.
The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 2007
It is an interesting reflection on the development of criminology in contemporary higher education and professional practice/training that two useful, jargon-free textbooks with a primary focus on the UK have been commissioned and published (Doig and Wright). Ten years ago, they might have been less marketable a proposition, but as the discipline has expanded, there has been created a need for more developed subject specialism than is available, for example, in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, now in its fourth edition subsequent to the completion of both books (see Nelken (2007) and Levi (2007a) for equivalent chapters). Neither textbook is particularly original or sophisticated theoretically: what they both offer are sound, well-organised reviews of existing conceptual and empirical literature, based on what the authors think students might need to know and on what is available, given the underdeveloped nature of the research and the relative inaccessibility and scattered nature of the subject matter. Doig himself has made a greater proportionate contribution to that research and practitioner literature than has Wright: but there are many more criminologists, sociologists and political scientists writing about organised crime than about fraud, reflecting the greater interest of States in the former than in the latter as part of the 'governmentality project'. There may be a marxisant hangover among social scientists that industrial sociology is the only 'real' work, and financial servicesthe employer of one in five Britons-are merely marginal 'service industries'. (Corporate crimes like health and safety offences are also more 'sexy' ideologically than fraud, since they can be fitted more readily-sometimes too readily-into traditional class exploitation models.) My own work has been dealt with quite fully and fairly in both textbooks so hubristhe cause of many a critical review-is not in issue here. What is in issue is how the texts treat the difficulties of: (i) framing sensible theoretical questions about the subject matter; (ii) testing empirical propositions about levels, organisation and threats of different phenomena; and (iii) maintaining a consistent position, for example, in the overlap or discontinuity between fraud and 'organised crime' (though I find it acceptable that different authors might take different positions on these items). For even though it seems ridiculous to maintain this binary concept of organised/ dis(un?)organised crime when one tries to account for how and why crimes (including frauds) are organised in particular ways by particular sets of people, both (i) analyses of law and policing practices, and (ii) habits of mind, keep returning us to the familiar categories. This is more of a problem with Wright's than with Doig's book, for Wright ends up with the conventional set of ethnic/national 'threats' with which we are familiar from NCIS (now Serious and Organised Crime Agency) and Europol 'threat assessments'. It is very difficult to retain a sense of fluidity of subject matter without dissolving categories altogether, and the tension between writing about criminal