COMPLIANCE – COMPANY LAW AND CRIMINAL LAW PERSPECTIVES

Compliance is an important topic from both company law and criminal law perspectives. However, it is generally not sufficiently discussed in Serbian legal literature. This is true to an even greater extent regarding the intersection between company law and criminal law. It this paper, the authors provide an overview of the rules referencing compliance function in Serbian laws which govern companies and their organization, as well as in codes applicable to both the public and private sectors. Because new laws are often adopted or the laws in force are amended in Serbia, it is not easy to interpret and comply with laws. Serbian legal system recognizes liability of legal persons for criminal offences, but the Law of Liability of Legal Persons for Criminal Offences is rarely applied in practice. On the other hand, liability for economic offences is much more common. Therefore, compliance system is also a crime prevention measure that could lead to reduction of costs for companies, but specific conditions as, for example, law application, must be taken into account in order to understand the compliance system effects on company behaviour. After outlining the relevant rules, the authors present the findings of their research which was carried out by analysing the codes of ethics and corporate governance codes of several Serbian companies and their approaches to compliance. Specifically, the authors examined the compliance programs of the 40 most successful companies in Serbia in 2023. The authors conclude that more than half of the companies in the sample acknowledge and publish some elements of their compliance programs on their websites. The most common elements are the whistle-blowing procedure and the code of ethics. Compared to other research conducted abroad, it can be concluded that while companies in Serbia recognize the importance of compliance, there is still room for improvement in terms of the number of companies that publicly share their compliance efforts, as well as the content and quality of these reports.