Compliance – Company Law and Criminal Law Perspectives
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Compliance is an important topic from both company law and criminal lawperspectives. However, it is generally not sufficiently discussed in Serbian legalliterature. This is true to an even greater extent regarding the intersection betweencompany law and criminal law. It this paper, the authors provide an overview of therules referencing compliance function in Serbian laws which govern companies andtheir organization, as well as in codes applicable to both the public and privatesectors. Because new laws are often adopted or the laws in force are amended inSerbia, it is not easy to interpret and comply with laws. Serbian legal systemrecognizes liability of legal persons for criminal offences, but the Law of Liabilityof Legal Persons for Criminal Offences is rarely applied in practice. On the otherhand, liability for economic offences is much more common. Therefore,compliance system is also a crime prevention measure that could lead to reductionof costs for companies, but specific conditions as, for example, law application,must be taken into account in order to understand the compliance system effects oncompany behaviour. After outlining the relevant rules, the authors present thefindings of their research which was carried out by analysing the codes of ethicsand corporate governance codes of several Serbian companies and their approachesto compliance. Specifically, the authors examined the compliance programs of the40 most successful companies in Serbia in 2023. The authors conclude that morethan half of the companies in the sample acknowledge and publish some elementsof their compliance programs on their websites. The most common elements arethe whistle-blowing procedure and the code of ethics. Compared to other researchconducted abroad, it can be concluded that while companies in Serbia recognize theimportance of compliance, there is still room for improvement in terms of thenumber of companies that publicly share their compliance efforts, as well as thecontent and quality of these reports.
Source: Iustinianus Primus Law Review
Authors: Jelena Lepetic, Natalija Lukic
Language: English
Subfield: Strategy and Management
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7131342829
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