Sentencing the corporate offender - beyond the imposition of fines

LL.M. (Commercial Law)In sentencing a corporate criminal in South Africa the Criminal Procedure Act merely provides for a fine to be imposed as a sanction. In this dissertation I explore the numerous problems with fines, in order to portray how the use of fines as the sole method of punishment cannot truly attain the aims of punishment. I suggest that the aims of punishment could be more effectively obtained if a range of sanctions were to be pooled together to form an array of punishments from which the courts can choose. The legislature needs to further consider other preventative mechanisms and move towards a system of compliance which could be considered as supplemental to the punitive sanctions, thereby aligning South African sentencing with the recent global movement towards the aims of rehabilitative sentencing. Furthermore I illustrate how incorporating compliance into the criminal sphere will induce companies towards the adoption of self-regulation which is not to say that self-regulation should be solely relied on however, it would be a good spin-off of the new sanctioning regime