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This decree by the Nazi Government in 1933 is probably the single most important event leading to the advent of bank secrecy laws as we know them today. This criminal provision was enacted to halt the German Jews' movement of assets out of Germany and into Swiss banks — a movement that was occasioned by the Government's attempt to seize the Jews' assets. Swiss banks were chosen because of their geographic proximity, but more so because of Switzerland's then unofficial policy of confidentiality over banking deposits and transactions.

The corporate disclosure decision is one of the most difficult decisions any corporation, its management and counsel will face. If a corporation learns that it or one of its employees has engaged in a fraud or crime, the corporation, through its officers and directors, must decide whether it should disclose the fraud or crime to the government and, if the decision to disclose is made, what the scope of the disclosure should be. These decisions are fraught with dangers which threaten to expose the corporation and its employees to civil and criminal liability.

The forces of globalisation have had a profound effect on the world's economies and it should come as no surprise that they have given new opportunities for organised crime and new challenges for legal systems and law enforcement. While the phenomenon of organised crime is not new, it has been growing in recent years and is now generating and laundering huge illegal profits, subsequently investing them in legal business. Strategies against organised crime will be shaped by the mental models used to understand it, and anyone whose mental model of organised crime is derived from the Chicago gangsters of the 1920s or the Mafia godfather of cinematic fiction is using the mental model of a bygone era. Organised crime today must be understood using a business model and hence viewed as businesses, producing illicit goods and services, which vary in size and scale on a continuum from small, local businesses to multinational corporations. The business model assists in analysing the structures of organised crime and, by applying it, one can postulate for example that, at the latter end of the continuum, organised crime groups will, like all multinational corporations, have their own managing directors, finance directors and other corporate officers. The unprecedented challenge now facing law enforcement authorities is to develop effective strategies to combat these multinational corporations of organised crime.