Understanding the origins of state-corporate crime. An analysis of the Prestige and Morecambe Bay disasters.

The Prestige oil spill and its tragic consequences are analysed in this paper in the context of the general structure oil production, transportation and the pattern of impunity that protects key state and corporate players. The paper challenges the general assumption that the state and the corporation exist as autonomous and independent institutions, and thus, challenges the misunderstanding of states and corporations as representing opposing interests of the public versus the private. As such, it offers a correction to the prevalent assumption that corporate crimes arise from 'moments of rupture' or the rupture of states’ capacities to regulate corporate power. Instead, it argues that the formation of the conditions of the disaster are the result of a wider regime of permission for a system of capital accumulation in which states guarantee the reproduction of the power of capital in its corporate form.