The Relationship between Neoliberalism and Corporate Crime

This essay examines the correlation between the ideology of neoliberalism and corporate crime, focusing on fraud, corruption, and environmental harm in various industries. It explores how neoliberalism influences these crimes and the challenges in combating them.

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The Relationship between the Ideology of Neoliberalism and Corporate Crime
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Neoliberalism ideology accentuates the worth of free-market competition (capitalism). The
association amid Neoliberal ideology and corporate crime is termed as a group of economic
strategies that assume that the economy does well in nonexistence of intrusions. In this case,
quotas, tariffs, and subsidies and other interferences by the government are seen as hindrances to
the progression of the economy. According to Harvey (2011, p.80);
“The drive towards market freedoms and the commodification of everything can all too
easily run amok and produce social incoherence. The destruction of forms of social
solidarity leaves a gaping hole in the social order. It then becomes peculiarly difficult to
combat anomie and control the resultant anti‐social behaviours such as criminality.”
According to the Guardian, neoliberalism is obscurity and is both a sign and cause of its power.
It is alleged to have been a significant player towards the variety of crises like offshoring of
riches and power, the downfall of public well-being and tutelage, child poverty, destruction of
ecosystems, among others (Monbiot, 2016). The concept has become so persuasive in the recent
past that rarely can people realize it as an ideology. The ideology came about as a cognizant
attempt to redesign human life and alter the locus of power. Neoliberalism is for the idea that all
human relations are characterized by competition. Citizens are known as consumers, with their
egalitarian rights exercised through buying and selling, in a fashion that prizes excellence and
chastises incompetence. Neoliberalism stresses that ‘the market’ delivers benefits unachievable
through planning. When there is an attempt to regulate competition negatively, that is treated as
unwelcoming to liberty. This essay examines the correlation between the ideology of
neoliberalism and corporate crime.
There are various practices of fraud and corruption that have become widespread in the
economies of both developed and developing states (Whyte and Wiegratz, 2016). For example,
the Volkswagen defeat device scandal has been termed as the most widely spread and publicized
example of fraud in a key sector of the global economy. This automobile industry is only one of
a number of industrial sectors, like oil and gas, financial products, pharmaceuticals and others in
which fraud scandals have become so common. This is just an indication of how many
fundamental business segments in the global economy are endemic with fraud. These practices
of fraud and corruption are fueled by distinct set of philosophies, norms and values that have

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social currency in modern capitalistic civilizations, together as the moral culture (Whyte and
Wiegratz, 2016).
From mainstream debates in Western academic scholarship on the complex relationship between
neoliberalism and fraud tend to make a common, oversimplified assumption that corruption and
fraud are most likely going to go away in the present neoliberal period with the liberalization of
markets to becoming more open, competitive and efficient, and with polities that take liberal
forms of democracy, transparency and accountability (Whyte and Wiegratz, 2016).
According to Tombs and Whyte (2015), the dominant cultural position of the institutions in the
dominant cultural positions of the institutions in which the power of capital is realized, firms
remain unshaken, even with the vast evidence of repetitive corporate trickery and corporate
crime in many advanced capitalist countries. This is the notion of neoliberalism as a set of
fraudulent ideas and not a type of social system as it is imagined. Neoliberalism is a diagnostic
category often used to “identify, describe and make sense of a system of sometimes
interconnected and sometimes disparate, but always contradictory, truth claims about the way
human societies should be constructed”. (Whyte and Wiegratz, 2016). Recently, corporations
continue to win most quarrels against obstructive practices, social regulation or more severe tax
regimes. Restrictive regulation in fraud-ridden sectors are only practiced in partial forms and
after years of outrages, public barbarity and activism and resulting upsurge of political pressure
to do something. In this regard, respective governments are seen to act in a manner that the moral
domination of capitalism is something to be cherished than regulated. The suggestion from this
whole proposition is that key political economic players are able to withstand their general
pledge to defend and improve neoliberal social order and its political-economic and normative
tool.
According to White (2013: p. 255)
“The most criminogenic agents of environmental harm within a global capitalist political
economy are members of the capitalist class, operating within the institutional context of
transnational corporations”
In instances of power misuse for proceeds to the exclusion of all, there is a most likely
consequence of harm resulting. Both government and business interests require the exploitation
of human labour and environmental resources. Nevertheless, although both of these could relate

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to market economies, hegemonic addresses regarding development and freedom have intensified
the harmfulness of the enterprise over the last few decades. In this kind of case, neo-liberalism
ideologies and philosophies are in contradiction with their very own maxims: which are, that the
full expenses of dealings ought to be tolerated by the parties involved. Most of the economic
doings and businesses on the other hand, have a key price on hominids and ecologies, although
conformist economists tag such price with heartening euphemism. This shows how neoliberalism
sees ecological harm as an external accident that is insignificant and one that comes about
unintentionally (Ruggiero and South, 2013).
According to a study by Ruggiero and South (2013), the state‐corporate crime tactic is concerned
with:
“… illegal or socially injurious actions that result from a mutually reinforcing interaction
between (1) policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more institutions of
political governance and (2) policies and/or practices in pursuit of the goals of one or more
institutions of economic production and distribution”.
From another study by Katz (2010), the state corporate crime perception is useful when applied
to cases that encompass commercial power and ecological crime at local and international levels
plus there are numerous examples of ecological harms and crimes which are also state-corporate
crimes. Some of the examples include corporate criminality and the effects it has on to the
environment like pollution, health and safety in the workstations where breaches have
ecologically damaging costs; criminal entrepreneurs and fraudulent bureaucrats getting involved
in illicit discarding of toxic waste; and the effect and bequest of law implementation and martial
processes on sceneries, water supply, air quality and living things inhabiting these areas.
“The contamination of drinking water, the degradation of soil and the pollution of air and
land all expose people (usually those in poor and developing countries) to substantial
health risks … Acts of eco-crime are linked to the poverty and social dislocation, as well
as the mental and physical debilitation, of people who are victims of corporations and
states that deliberately violate environmental agreements". (Walters 2010, p.181)
There are various forms of crimes and harms that the oil industry is involved in. the direct harms
of pollution can be said to be principal offenses (Ruggiero and South, 2013). Secondary crimes
incidences regarding the same are also to be considered carefully. The exploitation of oil and

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enterprises can also enhance the development of criminogenic settings whereby other people are
incentivized. For example, some countries rich in oil are termed to be incubators for criminal
enterprise, in which oil syndicates are the victims of crime and the illegal earnings that result are
cast-off for the funding of other illicit activities (Ruggiero and South, 2013). In some instances,
the profit resulting from illicit oil businesses are used by politicians to fund campaigns of
violence- to include terrorism- and also waning the already flimsy countries instigated by crimes
done against the oil sector. McHugh (2012) has explained the three ways in which illegal and
unrecorded crude oil trading occurs: smuggling, mingling, and bunkering. The three vices are a
characteristic of enterprising economic behaviour and are paramount in contexts where there is a
well-defined operation of criminal organizations and where illicit enterprises are interlocked with
vicious rebellious groups, especially in Iraq and Nigeria. In those kinds of situations, political
and economic purposes interlock and conflict and there develops a hostile feeling against any
international companies and the state armed forces that are safeguarding this absorption of riches
for the local elite and for the externalization of profits to corporations abroad. This goes to show
the close connection between crimes of all kind ad oil. The civil unending wars in Sudan (among
the largest of the African countries) shows how crimes and violence are significant to the
geopolitics of oil.
“The inequitable distribution of the costs and benefits of oil production fueled the
Sudanese civil war. The war resulted in approximately 2 million deaths, 4 million
internally displaced, 420,000 refugees, and approximately 2,500 rebel child soldiers”.
(Parr 2013: p. 140).
It is, however, good to note that environmental harm is not solely linked with privately-owned
oil corporations. The risks inherent in the oil industry are so well rooted that even when the
independent countries take control of the oil trade, they cannot lead any significant change. A
good example is that in June 2013 where there was an oil spill in the Ecuadorean Amazon spread
downstream in the direction of Peru and Brazil. There was approximately 1.6 liters of crude oil
squared into the local rivers leading to the contamination of the drinking supply of Coca in
Ecuador. The Ecuadorian environment has been a victim of actions from the powerful oil
industry. In the present day, the oilfields are under the control of local state-run companies with
the government planning to increase manufacture in the Amazon to finance a determined
expansion program (Ruggiero and South, 2013).

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The corporate state regulatory scheme permits that the oil firms provide the degree of oil spill
and destruction and that this is often an under-estimation of the real level of spill and damage
(Schrope 2013). There are leaks and environmental destruction happening on an extremely
regular fashion globally, the mainstream never appealing the type of profile-raising linked to BP
Deepwater Horizon (Brisman and South, 2013, p. 9-10)
Neoliberalism also influences chemical crimes involving corporations. Numerous dangerous
elements cause biochemical injury, and with many fresh chemicals announced every year, it has
become exceedingly hard to estimate their long-term effects. Chemicals do not also pass through
tests for the brain, resistant, and hormonal consequences, and often not verified at all for cancer,
neurodegenerative or autoimmune effects. Lack of adequate testing is a predisposing factor to the
prevention of harm, choice of harmless elements and technologies, and connecting damage to
contact for persons affected, non-human classes, and varied ecologies (Ruggiero and South,
2013).
In conclusion, as Harvey (2011) noted, “The drive towards market freedoms and the
commodification of everything can all too easily run amok and produce social incoherence. The
destruction of forms of social solidarity leaves a gaping hole in the social order. It then becomes
peculiarly difficult to combat anomie and control the resultant anti‐social behaviors such as
criminality”. (Harvey 2011, p. 80). Neoliberalism is in the air, and it seems to have no end. It has
been used by all different kinds of people like politicians to describe a set of an idea whereby
markets are elevated beyond all other social principles and institutions. In the corporate sector, it
is seen to have a great impact on matters pertaining to fraud and corruption on financial issues,
environmental harm, the (oil industry and the chemical crimes), among others.

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Katz, R.S., 2010. The corporate crimes of Dow Chemical and the failure to regulate
environmental pollution. Critical Criminology, 18(4), pp.295-306.
McHugh, L., 2012. The Threat of Organised Crime to the Oil Industry. A paper published by
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