Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the Decade

Full report

Every year, the major business magazines put out their annual surveys of big business in America.

You have the Fortune 500, the Forbes 400, the Forbes Platinum 100, the International 800 -- among others.

These lists rank big corporations by sales, assets, profits and market share. The point of these surveys is simple -- to identify and glorify the biggest and most profitable corporations.

The point of the list contained in this report, The Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the Decade -- is to focus public attention on a wave of corporate criminality that has swamped prosecutors offices around the country.

This is the dark underside of the marketplace that is given little sustained attention and analysis by politicians and news outlets.

To compile The Top 100 Corporate Criminals of the 1990s, we used the most narrow and conservative of definitions -- corporations that have pled guilty or no contest to crimes and have been criminally fined.

The 100 corporate criminals fell into 14 categories of crime: Environmental (38), antitrust (20), fraud (13), campaign finance (7), food and drug (6), financial crimes (4), false statements (3), illegal exports (3), illegal boycott (1), worker death (1), bribery (1), obstruction of justice (1) public corruption (1), and tax evasion (1).

We did not try to assess and compare the damage committed by these corporate criminals or by other corporate wrongdoers.

There are millions of Americans who care about morality in the marketplace.

But few Americans realize that when they buy Exxon stock, or when they fill up at an Exxon gas station, they are in fact supporting a criminal recidivist corporation.

And few Americans realize that when the take a ride on a cruise ship owned by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, they are riding on a ship owned by a criminal recidivist corporation.

Six corporations that made the list of the Top 100 Corporate Criminals were criminal recidivist companies during the 1990s.

In addition to Exxon and Royal Caribbean, Rockwell International, Warner-Lambert, Teledyne, and United Technologies each pled guilty to more than one crime during the 1990s.

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http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/top100.html