Criminal compliance: New challenges to prevent market abuse in Chile

This paper is about the legal challenges underlying the Chilean Economic Crimes Act 21.595 of 2023. By examining some passages of it not usually considered in previous research, this paper aims to identify some changes in the criminal liability of legal persons and discuss its role in accordance with the criminal offences covered by the Securities Market Act 18.045. By legal challenges, we meant a legal person’s compliance program implementation rather than their normative analysis. Thus, what is of principal concern to us is how legal persons could avoid criminal market abuse offences-illegal disclosure of information and market manipulation-by adopting some compliance guidelines. The idea is to explain how to adopt a compliance program as a moral standard, not merely as an important fact to track the limits of criminal law sentences. The central argument of this paper is that these programs must include a mechanism by which social interaction, guided by corporative governance, habituates coworkers to internalise moral standards to preserve it. This subject is in tune with the recent interest in compliance programs among Chilean legal persons. Although the problem of these programs, that is, the question of how legal persons can implement a stable system to avoid criminal market abuse offences by their members, has been a recurrent topic in the European and North American corporate culture, the recent period marks a shift in which preventive measures should be adopted under the Chilean criminal law system. Furthermore, the recent Economic Crimes Act 21.595 amendments to the Securities Market Act 18.045 will be considered.