White Collar Crimes and a Global Strategy against Corruption

Launched in 2004 by the Federal Policy of Brazil, the operation named Lava Jato evolved to a task force among several Brazilian institutions in co-operation with international organizations. The criminal investigations, initially focused on money laundering, enlarged to cover allegations of corruption of public officials and politicians. However, the outputs of the Lava Jato builds on a previous strategy of the Brazilian authorities to promote the alignment of the legal and institutional framework to the international recommendations for combating corruption and economic crime. The article starts by exploring the Brazilian public policies adopted for legally typify white-collar crimes and address its critical stages such as the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of offense, and the recovery of the proceeds. Secondly, it investigates the possible deviations of the actions implemented by the Curitiba branch of the Lava Jato Operation, which were mainly driven by public opinion pressure and ideological interference. Further, it oversees the economic impact of national anti-corruption actions by comparing the developments of the Brazilian operation Lava Jato to its Italian equivalent Mani Pulite. Based on the Italian and Brazilian experiences, the study proposes additional global driven legislative measures directed to neutralize the interference of local public opinion and political interests, and aimed at reducing the negative economic outputs generated through misguided criminal investigation and the prosecution of offense. This paper also works out the concept of crime and victim in a globalized context, in line with UN Agenda 2030