Dr. Costantino Grasso is an academic and lawyer specialized in corporate and economic crime, corporate social responsibility, corporate governance and business ethics.
He has worked as a consultant and advisor for the European Union and Council of Europe as well as national governments, academic institutions and firms in Europe and North America. Dr. Grasso holds a LLB (Hons.), PgD, LLM and PhD in internationalization of criminal law policies and corporate crime.
He currently serves as an Associate Professor in Business and Law at Manchester Law School. Before that, he worked at Coventry University and the University of London. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Corporate Crime Observatory and the Corporate Social Responsibility and Business Ethics Blog.
In 2014, he joined the prosecution team of the Bribery and Corruption division of the U.K. Serious Fraud Office participating in the first-ever English Deferred Prosecution Agreement between that prosecuting body and ICBC Standard Bank Plc, which concerned a complex case of transnational bribery.
In 2016, he received from the UK Solicitor General, as part of the prosecuting team, the UK Government Legal Department’s Prosecutor of the Year Award for the substantial input into the success of the investigations.
As of 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 been involved 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 2019, in recognition of his work in the area of financial crime, the European Commission’s Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF) granted external funding to his international research project VIRTEU, which aims at exploring the interconnections between tax crimes and corruption. He is included as an international expert in the anti-corruption knowledge hub of Transparency International.
