Dr. Costantino Grasso (LL.B., Pg.D., LL.M., Ph.D.) is an Associate Professor in Business and Law at Manchester Law School. His areas of expertise include transnational criminal law, corporate and economic crime, corporate social responsibility, corporate governance and business ethics.

He has served as a consultant, advisor, and lecturer on topics related to those matters for the European Union and Council of Europe as well as national governments, academic institutions and firms in Europe and North America. Dr Costantino Grasso is the editor in chief of the Corporate Crime Observatory and the Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Blog. He is also a member of the Law and Society Association (USA), the Society for Business Ethics (USA), and the Society of Legal Scholars (UK).

As an active member of research communities at both the domestic and international level, he has developed an extensive research network, which includes top American and European academic institutions like New York University, Boston College, Berkeley, Collège de France, Norwegian School of Economics, Copenhagen Business School, University Carlos III of Madrid, and LUISS Guido Carli.

Being qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales and as a lawyer in Italy, he has always combined academic activities with legal practice. In 2014, he worked as a corporate governance and compliance specialist for the Serious Fraud Office participating in the first-ever U.K. Deferred Prosecution Agreement between that prosecuting body and ICBC Standard Bank Plc, which concerned a complex case of transnational bribery. On that occasion, he received an award for the substantial input into the success of the agreement and, on 23 November 2016, he was awarded as a member of the case team the UK Government Legal Department's Prosecutor of the Year Award. Although he did not accept the role due to the impracticality of serving judicial functions abroad, on 19 July 2017 he was appointed by the Italian Ministry of Justice as an honorary judge at the Court of Turin.

As of June 2018, he has been appointed as an international expert in the area of corruption and good governance by the Council of Europe - Directorate General Human Rights and Rule of Law - Economic Crime and Cooperation Division (Tender 2017/AO/51). In this capacity, he has already participated in several international missions liaising with judges, prosecutors, investigators and government representatives of various countries (e.g., Albania, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Montenegro).

In recognition of his work in the area of financial crime, the European Commission’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) granted him external funding for the 2-year (April 2020 – June 2022) project VIRTEU, which was an innovative and high-profile legal research project including both an interdisciplinary and a comparative approach, and is aimed at exploring the interconnections between tax crimes and corruption.

In 2021, he also served as the Principal Investigator of “Whistling at the Fake: The Crucial Role of Whistleblowers in Countering Disinformation,” which was a six-month international research project funded by the NATO's Public Diplomacy Division that aimed at addressing the gap of citizen comprehension of the forms, means, and impacts of misinformation and disinformation, and exploring the role and effectiveness of whistleblowers and knowledgeable insiders as a means of exposing hostile information activities and increasing public resilience to acts of this nature.

Selected publications

Books (Monographs)

(with Stefano Manacorda) Fighting Fraud and Corruption at the World Bank: A Critical Analysis of the Sanctions System (Springer 2018) pp. 1-215.

Edited Collections and Special Issues

(with Diane Ring and Lorenzo Pasculli) Tax Evasion, Corruption and the Distortion of Justice, Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume 85, Issue 4, 2022.

Articles in peer-reviewed journals

(with Diane Ring) ‘Beyond Bribery: Exploring the Intimate Interconnections Between Corruption and Tax Crimes,’ Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume 85, Issue 4, 2022, pp. 1-47.

‘Peaks and Troughs of the English Deferred Prosecution Agreement: The Lesson Learned from the DPA between the SFO and ICBC SB Plc,’ Journal of Business Law, Issue 5, 2016, pp. 388-408.

Book chapters

‘The troubled path towards greater transparency as a means to foster good corporate governance and fight against corruption in the energy sector,’ in Handbook of Energy Finance: Theories, Practices and Simulations (World Scientific Publishing: Duc Khuong Nguyen and Stéphane Goutte eds.. 2020) pp. 363–393.

‘Corruption in World Bank-Financed Development Projects: A Phenomenon-Focused Examination,’ in Corruption in the Global Era: Causes, Sources and Forms of Manifestation (Routledge: Lorenzo Pasculli and Nicholas Ryder eds., 2019) pp. 258-276.

‘The Dark Side of Power: Corruption and Bribery within the Energy Sector,’ in Research Handbook on EU Energy Law and Policy (Edward Elgar: Rafael Leal-Arcas and Jan Wouters eds. 2017) pp. 237-256.

Techical Reports

(with Stephen Holden) Expert Survey Report: The Interconnections between Tax Crime and Corruption. VIRTEU Project, Corporate Crime Observatory, Sept. 2022.

(with Stephen Holden) Countering Tax Crimes and Corruption: Recommendations for Law Enforcement Officials. VIRTEU Project, Corporate Crime Observatory, June 2022.

‘Concerns regarding or improvement to the UK Anti-Money Laundering regime,’ written evidence in economic crime matters submitted to the United Kingdom Parliament - House of Commons - Treasury Committee (2020).

(with other authors) Liability of Legal Persons for Corruption Offences, Council of Europe, May 2020

Articles in Scientific Blogs and the Press

‘Steven Donziger vs Chevron: A battle between David and Goliath against human rights violations and environmental degradation,’ (2021), The Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Blog

‘Anti-corruption white list: A further step towards the establishment of good corporate citizenship?,’ (2021), The Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Blog

‘The European Court of Justice as a bastion of democracy and rule of law,’ openDemocracy (2018)

‘Debate on corporate corruption in light of the 24-year sentence imposed to Park Guen-Hye in South Korea,’ (2018), The Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Blog

‘Three thoughts on corporate corruption in the wake of the Samsung’s heir release from prison,’ (2018), The Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Blog

‘The Dark Side of Power: The drivers of corporate corruption in the energy sector,’ (2018), The Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Blog

‘We must do better to protect journalists like Daphne Caruana Galizia,’ The Conversation, (2017)

‘Lessons from Samsung and S. Korea in cracking down on corruption,’ The Conversation, (2017)

‘US Republicans give the oil industry what it wants – less transparency,’ The Conversation, (2017)

‘South Korea’s scandal reignites the global debate on corruption,’ The Conversation, (2016)

International engagement, training sessions, and consultations

International expert for the Council of Europe within the project “Enhancing the systems of prevention and combating corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing in Georgia” to analyse the effectiveness of the Georgian anti-corruption and anti-corporate crime legal framework with a focus on prevention of corruption by law enforcement agencies and offer highly specialised training sessions on anti-corruption strategies.

International expert for the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training (CEPOL) within the Residential Training Activity focused on Investigating and Preventing Corruption (2021).

International expert for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) within the project “Modern Parliament for a Modern Armenia” to explore through an international comparative analysis how to better protect witness and whistleblowers who are involved in parliamentary proceedings in Armenia (2021).

Project Team Member for the Financial Times Global Legal Hackathon, Challenge - Whistleblowers as First Responders: How to Stem the Tide of Fraud and Corruption in the Maelstrom of COVID-19 (2020).

International expert for the Council of Europe within the project “Action against Economic Crime in Montenegro” to identify main deficiencies in the applicable legal framework preventing effective processing of tax evasion and identify weaknesses in the detection and processing of tax evasion (2021)

International expert for the Council of Europe within the project “Action against Economic Crime in Albania” to assess the operational mechanisms and capacities of the Department of Administration, Transparency and Anticorruption and increase the efficiency of audit and inspections on anti-corruption compliance (2020).

International expert for the Council of Europe within the project “Enhancing the systems of prevention and combating corruption, money laundering and terrorist financing in Georgia” to enhance competent authorities’ capacity to effectively enforce corporate liability, by examining mechanisms of investigation and prosecution of criminal liability, evidence gathering, and establishment of sanctions and alternatives to criminal proceedings (2019).

International expert for the Council of Europe within the project “Controlling corruption through law enforcement and prevention” to develop proposals aimed at fostering private sector integrity compliance in the Republic of Moldova, and present the resulting recommendations to national authorities and private sector representatives (2019).

International expert for the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Training (CEPOL) within the programme “Undercover Officers - New identities on international scale” to offer training sessions to law enforcement officials aimed at developing a common model of conduct while creating new identities for undercover agents (2018).

International expert for the Council of Europe within the project “Strengthening capacities to fight and prevent corruption in Azerbaijan” to organise and deliver two back-to-back seminars on criminal liability of legal persons for trainee judges (2017).