Phantom fraudsters still: re-viewing long-firm fraud

Fraud, states Levi, in the preface to the original, 1981, edition of the Phantom Capitalists, is a 'Cinderella' topic for the criminal justice process and receives little media attention. This situation had, he argued, begun to change, and 'many conservatives as well as socialists argue that the government should step in to remove or least to perform plastic surgery upon the “unacceptable face of capitalism”', albeit that there are widely divergent views over 'how much of that face is unacceptable and over the role of the criminal law in the control of commercial activities' (p. xiii). With some linguistic changes, not least the use of the word 'socialist', these comments could well have been written today, although in hindsight, his prediction of change might be seen as somewhat optimistic. Bankers have come to represent the unacceptable face of the 'new', neoliberal economy and the use of the criminal law remains highly contested following decades of deregulation.