Monetary sanctions against corporations: options for reform

About the seminar 

Monetary sanctions are the main method of punishing corporations for breaching the law. They are a mainstay of enforcement in many areas, including competition and consumer law, securities and investment law, environment law, bribery and corruption, privacy, and money-laundering. In this presentation, Professor Brent Fisse and Dr Radha Ivory examine the utility of these sanctions, with particular focus on the ALRC recommendations in the Final Report on corporate criminal liability (2020) and the escalation of maximum penalties under the Treasury Laws Amendment (More Competition, Better Prices) Act 2022 (Cth).  

About the speakers

Professor Brent Fisse 

Brent Fisse is the principal of Brent Fisse Lawyers, Sydney. He was a partner of Gilbert + Tobin in Sydney from 1995-2003. He is a consultant to the Asian Development Bank on competition law and policy in Pacific Island economies including Fiji and PNG. Brent is an honorary professor of law at the University of Sydney.

He is the co-author (with Caron Beaton-Wells) of Australian Cartel Regulation (2011) and the author of various books and papers on competition law and corporate regulation.

Dr Radha Ivory 

Dr Radha Ivory is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Queensland, Australia (UQ), where she teaches company law and researches the transnational regulation of corruption and corporate crime. Radha’s work has been published by leading university presses and with leading law journals. Her current projects include studies of efforts to reform economic crime laws, including the international rules on corporate settlements in foreign bribery cases.

About the chair 

Professor Ross Grantham

Professor Ross Grantham's principal research interests are in the fields of corporate governance and the private law. He has published extensively in the area of the duties of company directors, as well as on matters dealing with the theoretical nature of the company and the implications of this nature for the integration of the company as a juristic entity into the general legal system. He has also published extensively on developments in the law of unjust enriched and restitution, particularly the interface between restitution and the law of property, and on the theoretical and philosophical basis of the private law. In addition to his many articles in leading international journals, Professor Grantham is the author of a number of monographs and casebooks, and he has edited a number of collections of essays. He is also a member of the editorial boards of a number of leading international journals.

Professor Grantham holds degrees from Oxford University, the University of Auckland and the University of Queensland, and has held senior management positions at both the University of Auckland and the University of Queensland.