The answer to this argument is twofold. First, due to the separate personality of the corporation, the offenses are not attributed or publicly affected by the employees or shareholders, certainly not in the giant companies, which have thousands if not hundreds of thousands of shareholders. Second, and mainly, the company, at a certain stage, benefited from the commission of the offenses, profits enjoyed by the shareholders. Therefore, there is no reason for the shareholders to benefit from it when an economic benefit is received as a result of the commission of offenses, but when the company bears responsibility and pays as a result of the discovery of the offenses, the shareholders will claim that they should not lose due to the company's actions. As for the fact that these are not the same shareholders, this is not important because this is the nature and nature of investing in shares. The same is true for long-term projects, for which profits or losses are not attributed to those shareholders. In the article: Sara Sun Beale, "A Response to the Cities of Corporate Criminal Liability", 46 Am. Crim. L. Rev 1481, 1484 (2009) (hereinafter: Sun Beale, Corporate Criminal Liability), the author discusses the matter, explicitly referring to the bribery scandals of the global company Siemens that were exposed in the United States (ibid., at p. 1485):
"The shareholders of Siemens benefitted from its success when it used bribery and kickbacks to obtain contracts that generated billions of dollars of profit…. Why, then is it surprising that the corporation should be held liable for fines arising from criminal conduct, even though the fines might have affected the value of the shareholder's equity in Siemens?"
The argument that today the company has corrected its ways, and that its conviction will harm the employees is also unreasonable in my opinion. If the company is convicted of the acts attributed to it, it will be unequivocally clear that the acts were committed years ago, and since then Siemens has improved its ways (of course, as long as this is proven in the trial). In any case, the company's separate legal personality operates both in good times and in difficult times. It should also be noted that even when it comes to a human being, imposing criminal liability on him in general, and imprisonment (which is not relevant to society) in particular, harms his family and friends, and sometimes the companies he owns and manages, his creditors and his employees. These are damages that accompany the criminal proceeding whatsoever, and are not unique to the corporation that is being prosecuted.