This section can be summarized and said that the words of the Honorable President Dr. Moshe Zmora, who ruled that corporations should be held criminally responsible for their involvement in economic life, are even more relevant today, about seventy years later, when corporations are the main players in our lives as a whole, including commercial and economic life.
In the case before me, it is necessary to impose liability on the corporation, both due to the status of corporations today and the involvement of Siemens in tenders in general and the IEC in particular will attest (all as stated in the indictment), and due to the developments in the penal law in this context, when offenses of the type of bribery and money laundering in which the appellant is suspected are often committed by corporations.
My colleague, the Honorable Judge Benny Sagi, who sentenced the recipients of the bribes in the case (as part of a plea bargain, the sentence of June 13, 2017, in paragraph 13 of the sentence), noted the severity of the defendant's actions (of course, all assuming that the facts of the indictment are proven, but this is the assumption on which the parties base their preliminary arguments):
"The affair before us is serious by almost any standard, and shows a culture of deep corruption that has pervaded the IEC at the highest levels. Professional decisions relating to tenders amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars, which have significant public and social implications, were made alongside the large sums of bribes that Siemens systematically paid to senior officials in the IEC, whom it marked as influential.The indictment described a kind of "bribery factory" operated by Siemens in the State of Israel, through which it paid significant sums of money to many parties, including the defendants, as detailed in the indictment..."
The growth of corporations and the extent of their control over the life of commerce and the economy in the world as a whole, necessitates the imposition of criminal liability on them, along with the rights and influence they enjoy. In an article written in the United States that supports easing the imposition of criminal liability on corporations, Siemens is cited as an example of this purpose. In her article, Sun Beale, Corporate Criminal Liability, the author discusses the influence of giant corporations, and the resulting growing need to impose criminal liability on corporations. The author cites examples of this from companies such as Enron, which collapsed due to fraudulent acts and damaged the US economy, as well as dealing with bribery offenses committed by corporations, and notes, while citing as an example the global Siemens that was caught committing bribery offenses in many parts of the world (ibid.):