| The main question this paper will explore is the relation between the intensified focus on crime in the securities markets and the conspicuous lack of successful sentences in such cases. The last decade can be described as a period with feverish efforts to build up new control agencies and to create new laws who try to reduce the possible harmful effects of the growth in the financial markets. The ideas of deregulation and opening of the financial markets of the 1980's has slowly mutated into a position where the markets are supposed to do best if they manage themselves, but under the governing gaze of private and state control. Certain minimum standards have to exist in these markets, if not there might be lack of trust and loss of investments. In spite of the efforts to fight insider dealing, stock price manipulation and other forms of securities crimes, we only have one court sentence of insider dealing (the infamous pizza case), two acquittals and two or three sentence sof stock price manipulation in Norway. |
Updated 05/20/2006