INTRODUCTION

Globalization is the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale. Globalization has been encouraged by many organizations, such as the European Union (EU), the North American Free Trade Agreement, as well as the World Trade Organization. These institutions have fostered and enabled the opening of economies for international trade and cooperation in the past decades because globalization has been a force for good; it has increased global wealth, by growing economies and creating employment; and it has brought more people out of poverty than has been achieved at any other point in history.

An essential part of globalization is the incorporation of capital, information and technological expertise into one market, allowing the participants in this process to approach other parts of the world at a more rapid pace and with lower costs (Schroeder 2001). The financial sector, therefore, gains particular benefits from globalization. In fact, it is often stated that the financial market is the only sector that “has realized globalization in the true sense of ‘globalization’” (Shangquan 2000). One of the unintended effects of a globalized financial system, however, has been the globalization of crime.

Variously defined as “deviant behaviour [that] violates the prevailing norms and cultural standards on how humans ought to behave”, as a “public wrong” and as an exploit “injurious to the community” (Ormerod 2005), crime exists and endures because it offers the individual an opportunity to gain. Crime provides the individual with a cost-effective source of power, influence and authority, and so crime, it must be recognized, is the unavoidable consequence of human ambition and creativity, and the flip side of entrepreneurial spirit. It is held to be “wrong” and “injurious” because the private gains it creates typically benefit the criminal far less then they cost society. Estimates place the cost of crime to the US, for example, at about $1 trillion per annum (Anderson 1999; Reuter & Truman 2004; Takats 2007). Thus, inevitable as it may be, society can tolerate only a low level of crime, and all “injurious” behaviour must be criminalized.