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Two drug companies fined £260m for swindling NHS over 'life-saving medicines'
- ncmncm 5y agoIt is never very interesting, by itself, when some corporation gets fined. Ultimately it amounts to just fining their customers, who probably didn't do anything wrong, and probably are in a worse position to pay than the owners, unless the company goes into receivership; then the customers might be even worse off, if they paid for service and won't get it, and whoever the company owes money to will be on the hook too. What I expect to see along with each such fine is criminal charges against corporate officers and members of its board of directors who chose to direct the corporation to violate the law. Corporate law specifically provides for charging individuals, who can be put in prison or even executed: it is called "piercing the corporate veil". This practically never happens, although not for any defensible reason. Prosecutors normally pretend that the corporate officers are "just following orders" and are thus blameless, and that the corporation that they actually physically control issued the orders. Of course, "following orders" to violate the law is no legitimate defense. Furthermore, actually writing or saying the orders is itself a violation of the law. In principle, any corporate violation is the action of a conspiracy to violate the law, between the corporation as "legal person" and its officers, which in non-corporate cases is generally taken as worse than the offense of violating that law. The only reason I have discovered for the near absolute avoidance of "piercing the corporate veil" is that the individuals who would then be charged don't want to be.