White Collar Crime – Pakistan

White-collar crime refers to financially motivated, nonviolent crimes committed by individuals, businesses, and government professionals. Examples of white-collar crimes include securities fraud, embezzlement, corporate fraud, and money laundering.

The legal system of a country primarily aims to give justice to all its citizens without any discrimination. But this discrimination is in every legal system is true to exist. These are the loopholes in the system, which required to be looked into.

In the society, where we live is no exception, an offense committed by a person of low social rank is penalized stringently under the hard rules of law but if the same offense is committed by a person of high social rank, the situation changes. In practice, law, or I would say the system appears to be softened towards the offender.

As society emerged and developed, new challenges arose in every field collaterally in the world of crimes. A crime which is known as “White-Collar crime” also emerged in this course. This term was first coined by the sociologist Edwin Sutherland who was the chief proponent of this social concept of crime.

Within the field of criminology, white-collar crime has been defined by Edwin Sutherland as

It deals with criminal acts by public servants, persons in authority, or even persons involved in commercial organizations. White-collar crime, therefore, overlaps with corporate crime because the opportunity for fraud, bribery, insider trading, embezzlement, computer crime, and forgery is more available to white-collar employees.

White-collar crimes have a drastic effect on the economy and financial state of a country.

Classifications of White-Collar Crime

This was for the first time the classification of white-collar crime was done under the National Accountability Ordinance; whereas all the previous statutes did not define this term: It includes two persons:

Holder of Public Office: which also includes the public servants as defined in Sec. 21 of the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860; and

A person; as in the case of a Company or a body corporate, the sponsors, Chairman, Chief Executive, Managing Director, elected directors, by whatever name called.