Corporate fines and how they are set: what to do in the first ten days depends on whether the company keeps control of its own investigation and how fast counsel is briefed. A Swedish corporate fine (företagsbot) is not read off a tariff; it reflects the offence's seriousness, the company's preventive measures and its conduct after the matter surfaced.
Who this concerns
A corporate fine attaches to the company itself, not to the individual who acted. It becomes relevant when a criminal offence is suspected to have been committed in the course of the company's business and the company either failed to prevent it or benefited from it. The individual involved may face a separate criminal process; the company faces a parallel and distinct exposure that runs on its own timetable.
This concerns boards, general counsel and finance directors of any Swedish company or Swedish-registered subsidiary, regardless of size, once a prosecutor, a supervisory authority or the police opens a matter that touches the business. It also concerns companies that are not themselves suspected but whose employee's conduct is under scrutiny, because the fine can fall on the employer even where no individual is ultimately convicted.
Where the parent company sits outside Sweden, the exposure does not move with it. A Swedish subsidiary answers as a Swedish legal person under Swedish procedure regardless of where its shareholders or ultimate decision-makers are based. What does change is the practical logistics: instructions from a foreign parent take longer to reach local counsel, documents held on foreign servers raise separate questions about access and privilege, and a foreign board asked to approve an internal investigation on short notice often slows the very decisions that need to be made within days, not weeks.
What the law says
Under Swedish law as it currently stands, a corporate fine is a sanction directed at the legal person rather than the individual offender. A court assessing whether to impose one, and at what level, weighs several factors together: the seriousness of the underlying conduct, whether the company had reasonable measures in place to prevent it, what the company gained or avoided losing as a result, and how the company behaved once the matter came to light, including whether it cooperated with the investigation or took steps to limit the consequences.
None of these factors is a fixed formula. A company that reacted promptly, preserved evidence rather than let it disappear, and engaged constructively with the investigating authority is in a materially different position from one that stalled, destroyed records informally, or let an uncoordinated internal inquiry contaminate the evidence base. The first ten days are where that difference is created, because they are when the record of the company's own conduct starts to form alongside the record of the underlying offence.
How it works in practice
Day one: who takes charge
The first decision is not legal, it is organisational: who inside the company has the authority to instruct counsel, freeze document destruction schedules, and speak to employees, without waiting for a board meeting that may not happen for days. If that person is not identified before a matter opens, the first ten days are spent finding them instead of using them.
Securing documents and devices before anything moves
Routine document retention policies, backup rotations and device reassignments do not pause themselves because a matter has opened. A written instruction to suspend deletion, covering email, messaging apps used for business, and any devices connected to the individuals or transactions in question, needs to go out before ordinary IT processes overwrite what a later defence will need. This step has nothing to do with admitting wrongdoing; it is about not losing the material that could show there was none.
Deciding who runs the internal investigation
An internal investigation run by the same compliance function that missed the original issue, or by HR acting on instinct, tends to produce material that is neither privileged nor reliable when the company needs it most. Deciding early whether external counsel leads the fact-finding, and on what basis, determines whether the resulting interview notes and findings can later be protected from disclosure or whether they become evidence against the company itself.
Employees: interviews, legal privilege and conflicts of interest
An employee interviewed as part of the company's internal fact-finding is not the company's client, and their interests can diverge from the company's within the same interview. Conducting interviews without separating the company's counsel from any individual's personal exposure is one of the most common ways an internal investigation later damages the position it was meant to protect.
Talking to the prosecutor or supervisory authority
Whether and how the company engages with the authority in the opening days shapes how the rest of the matter is read. Volunteering information without first understanding what the authority already holds can foreclose options; refusing all contact can be read as obstruction. The right posture depends on the specific authority involved and the nature of the suspected offence, which is why this decision is made with counsel rather than by whoever answers the phone first.
Notifying insurers and the board
Most directors' and officers' liability policies impose a short notification window measured from when a company first becomes aware of circumstances that could give rise to a claim, and that window is set by the policy wording, not by the criminal process. Missing it can cost cover regardless of how the underlying matter is eventually resolved. The board also needs a factual briefing early enough that its own decisions, including any public statement, are made on the same information the company is building for its defence, not ahead of it.
What changes when the parent company is outside Sweden
A foreign parent asked to sign off on external counsel, an investigation budget or a public statement introduces a decision-making lag that a Swedish matter does not wait for. Building in a pre-agreed delegation, so that a named local officer can instruct counsel and take the first protective steps without waiting for sign-off from abroad, is one of the few structural fixes that pays off in exactly the situation this note is about.
What to check in the first ten days
- Who has authority to instruct counsel and has that authority been confirmed in writing
- Whether a document and device hold notice has gone out, and to whom
- Whether the individuals whose conduct is in question have been told to preserve, not to explain
- Whether the company's counsel and any individual employee's counsel are clearly separate
- Whether the D&O policy notification clock has started and what it requires
- What has already been said to the authority, by whom, and on what authority
- Whether a public statement is contemplated and, if so, on what factual basis
Does a corporate fine replace personal liability for the individual involved?
No. A corporate fine and an individual's criminal liability run on separate tracks. The company can be fined even where the individual is not convicted, and the individual can be prosecuted independently of whatever happens to the company. Treating the two as one process, with one set of counsel and one narrative, is a common source of conflict later in the matter.
Can the amount be reduced if the company reports the matter itself?
Cooperation and the company's conduct after the matter surfaced are factors a court weighs, but there is no fixed discount attached to self-reporting. What matters in practice is whether the company's response, including any disclosure, was accurate, timely and consistent with what the evidence later shows, which is precisely what the steps taken in the first ten days are meant to establish.
What if the search that opened the matter also covered company premises?
A dawn raid or search of business premises often runs on a parallel track to the fine assessment itself, and the two interact: how the company handled itself during the search feeds directly into how its later conduct is read. This is covered in detail in the note on searches at company premises, which sets out the immediate steps during and after a search.
The numbers
There is no fixed schedule that can be quoted here without sight of the specific provisions in play at the time, and this note does not invent one. What can be said with confidence is structural rather than numerical: the level of a corporate fine is not a simple multiple of turnover or of the gain involved, and it is not set at the moment the matter opens. It is set at the end of a process that the company's own conduct, from day one onward, feeds into.
The ten-day window in this note's title is a practical one, not a statutory deadline. It reflects how quickly document retention systems, insurance notification clocks and employee memory all start moving in directions that are hard to reverse, not a specific date fixed by any provision. Confusing the two, and assuming there is a legal grace period before anything needs to happen, is itself one of the more expensive mistakes available.
Where it usually goes wrong
The most common error is delay dressed up as caution: waiting for full clarity before doing anything, while document retention systems and employee memory move on regardless. A close second is running the internal investigation through the same people or function implicated in the original failure, which produces findings that satisfy nobody and protect no privilege.
Assuming an existing compliance programme is itself a defence is another frequent misstep. A programme that exists on paper but was not followed in practice tends to work against the company rather than for it, because it shows the company knew what good practice looked like and did not apply it. Equally common is assuming the company's liability insurance will absorb a corporate fine; many policies exclude regulatory and criminal fines from cover entirely, regardless of how the underlying conduct is judged.
Where this reasoning breaks down in the other direction: not every internal irregularity that reaches a prosecutor's desk results in a corporate fine. Matters that are genuinely minor, isolated, and met with a proportionate and prompt response from the company do not automatically escalate into a fine assessment, and treating every internal issue as an existential threat from day one can itself distort the company's own record of how it behaved. The judgement about which category a given matter falls into is exactly where independent legal assessment earns its place, and it cannot be made reliably from inside the same function that is under scrutiny.
Related exposures often surface alongside a fine matter rather than instead of it. A dispute over amounts owed under a related contract, for instance, does not automatically qualify for a summary recovery route once it becomes contested, as set out in the note on disputed claims and the summary route, and a claim connected to the same facts can run into its own limitation clock, covered in the note on interrupting limitation periods. Treating the fine matter in isolation from these adjacent tracks is a common way a company loses ground on more than one front at once.
What to do next
The first ten days are where a company either keeps control of the facts or hands that control to whoever else is building a record of the same events. This note goes as far as a self-directed review can safely go. Where it ends, and where an assessment of the company's actual exposure begins, is a review of the specific documents, the specific authority involved, and the specific sequence of events, not a general checklist.
The broader groundwork for this, including how a corporate fine assessment interacts with related recovery and enforcement questions, is set out across the economic-crime-defence practice. For a structured, document-level view of where a company's current preparedness stands before a matter opens, the corporate crime preparedness report sets out what a fine assessment actually looks for. Where a matter is already open and the first ten days are running now, the right next step is a direct assessment call, not a further reading list: contact the firm.