Introduction

News about fraud and other white-collar crimes is apparent in many of the global headlines. Major companies, such as banks, are under public scrutiny when it comes to their own alleged criminal behaviour, but also with regard to their efforts to prevent crime by others. For example, in the recent ING scandal, the Dutch bank settled with the Dutch Public Prosecution Service for an amount of €775 million, to avoid prosecution after being suspected of large-scale negligence with regard to anti-money laundering efforts (National Office for Serious Fraud, Environmental Crime and Asset Confiscation, 2018). The ING case is intriguing and brings to the fore one of the paradoxes that surround efforts to combat white-collar crime. On the one hand, the state is dependent on cooperation by and with private parties, while on the other these private parties may be the culprits.

It has long been acknowledged that the state is not able to fulfil all of the security demands of society (see, for example, Jones and Newburn, 2006). Private sector involvement in crime control is widespread (White, 2014; Gurinskaya and Nalla, 2018). When it comes to white-collar and corporate crime, an area in which the involvement of the criminal justice system has historically been limited, the situation seems to be even more pronounced.

The growth of private policing is a global phenomenon (see, for example, De Waard, 1999). However, scholarship on private policing and public–private relationships is predominantly Anglo–American and has a distinctly neoliberal focus. The rhetoric (focused on privatization and responsibilization) used in the public–private security debate fits better with laissez-faire, market-driven economies than with the welfare state model, which is more prevalent in Europe. What is more, the rhetoric seems to be an uncomfortable fit for corporate investigations as well. One reason for this is that dominant conceptualizations of private policing tend to make no distinction between different forms of private policing and, as a consequence, fail to appreciate the nuances between them. This calls for an alternative approach that counterbalances the hegemony of Anglo–American scholarship on private policing. Using the Netherlands as a case study representing a European welfare state, it is advocated here that such an approach should be developed from a European perspective.

This chapter discusses public–private relations in the context of internal financial crime within organizations.