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LEADING EXPERTS
VIRTEU
Vat fraud: Interdisciplinary Research on Tax crimes in the European Union
(Grant Agreement no: 878619)
VIRTUE will be enriched by the involvement of high-level specialists, who have established expertise in additional areas of knowledge so to assure an interdisciplinary approach to the research (Leading Area Experts) or in the functioning of the domestic legal systems on which the project focuses (Leading National Experts). Each Leading Expert will provide the Core Research Team with a comprehensive technical report that will become an integral part of the research outcomes and will be published on this website.
LEADING AREA EXPERTS
BUSINESS ETHICS
Prof. Daniel T. Ostas
Daniel T. Ostas holds the James G. Harlow, Jr. Chair in Business Ethics at the University of Oklahoma. He has taught business economics, business law, and business ethics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He has received more than twenty teaching awards. His research addresses the economics of marketplace ethics and the ethics of corporate legal strategy. An author of more than seventy scholarly works, including three books, Ostas has received more than a dozen international research awards. His coauthored book, Corporate Taxation and Social Responsibility, was recently published by Wolters Kluwer International.
CRIMINOLOGY
Dr. Salvatore Coluccello
Dr. Salvatore Coluccello teaches organised crime and human trafficking (and modern slavery) at both undergraduate and postgraduate level in the School of Humanities at Coventry University. He is Course Director for the MA in Terrorism, International Crime and Global security and the MA programme in Countering organised crime (and Modern Slavery). Salvatore has published a number of journal articles and chapter in books, and is the author of Challenging the mafia mystique: Cosa Nostra from legitimisation to denunciation (Palgrave- Macmillan 2016).
FORENSIC ACCOUNTING
Prof. Atul K. Shah
Atul K. Shah, who is at City, University of London, is an accomplished thought leader, writer, lecturer and broadcaster, with a PhD from London School of Economics. He has published and researched extensively on Ethical Finance and Professions, and exposed the collusion of professionals in the practice of creative accounting, audit failures, tax avoidance and evasion. His work has been profiled in Forbes, Guardian, Financial Times, Economia and on BBC Radio. He is passionate about reforming Accounting and Finance training and education and continues to provide global academic leadership in a number of critical areas relating to finance, accounting and corporate governance and regulation.
EUROPEAN CRIMINAL LAW
Prof. Stefano Manacorda
Stefano Manacorda (BA University of Naples; LLM Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne; PhD University of Florence), is a full professor in Criminal Law at the Università della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”. His research activity is focused on European and International criminal law, corporate criminal liability, white-collar crimes, protection of cultural heritage. In these areas, he is the author of almost 200 publications. He takes part regularly in national and international conferences and he is regularly consulted by domestic and international institutions.
LEADING NATIONAL EXPERTS
BULGARIA
Ruslan Stefanov
Ruslan Stefanov is the Director of the Economic Program at the Center for the Study of Democracy and has 20 years of experience in managing and delivering high-quality projects in civil society, research and consulting on anticorruption, informal economy, energy, and innovation in Europe. Ruslan is co-author of the Kremlin Playbook series: a joint project of CSD and CSIS on Russia’s economic footprint and influence in Europe. He is the knowledge and development coordinator of the Southeast European Leadership for Development and Integrity (SELDI.net), the largest regional civil society anticorruption network in the Western Balkans, Turkey, and the Eastern Neighborhood.
DENMARK
Prof. Karina Kim Egholm Elgaard
Karina Kim Egholm Elgaard is an Associate Professor in tax and VAT law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Copenhagen and is Co-Coordinator for FIRE – the Fiscal Relations Research Group. Before joining academia, she worked for almost a decade at law firms and auditing firms in Copenhagen, where she specialized primarily in VAT law. Her main research areas are the interaction between VAT law and income tax law, VAT grouping, and human rights and EU fundamental rights in tax and VAT law. She has published her research in Danish and international journals and presented at international conferences.
GREECE
Dr. Vasileios Petropoulos
Vasileios Petropoulos (BA University of Athens; PhD University of Munich, PhD University of Zurich) received his Post-Doc (Habilitation) from the University of Munich in the fields of criminal law, criminal procedure, European and international criminal law and financial criminal law (2010). He served as an academic at the CEGLA Institute of the Buchmann Faculty of Law of the University of Tel Aviv (2010). He has been an academic assistant at the criminal department of the Law School at the University of Athens since 2010, a visiting lecturer at the University Neapolis Pafos since 2015 and an academic tutor at the Hellenic Open University since 2018.
ITALY
Prof. Antonio Gullo
Antonio Gullo is Full Professor of Criminal Law and Director of the Ph.D. in Law and Business at the Department of Law, Luiss University, Rome. He was Legal Counselor of the Italian Minister of Justice and then State Undersecretary for Justice during the Monti government. He participated in national and international research projects on corporate crime, bribery and environmental crime. He authored two books and published widely in the fields of corporate crime, corruption, defamation and criminal sanctions.
THE NETHERLANDS
Prof. Joseph A. McCahery
Joseph Aloysius McCahery is an academic researcher, corporate lawyer and institutional adviser. McCahery is most notable for his contribution in corporate finance and law, European business law, financial markets and banking regulations, the political economy of federalism and taxation. As of 2015, McCahery is a professor of International Economic Law and the Financial Market Regulation at Tilburg University. As of the same year, McCahery is a director of the LLM Program at the Duisenberg School of Finance. During his career McCahery had served as a legal consultant for the Center for European Policy Studies, Monitoring Committee Corporate Governance, The Netherlands Ministry of Finance and OECD.
THE UNITED KINGDOM
Dr. Branislav Hock
Branislav Hock is a Senior Lecturer in Economic Crime at the University of Portsmouth. He is an author of Extraterritoriality and International Bribery: A Collective Action Perspective, Routledge 2020. Branislav has been involved in a broad range of research activities, many have been related to anti-corruption, transnational economic crime, and compliance. Branislav is the founding member of the European Compliance Center. He also worked for a law firm where he was advising on various compliance issues. Branislav worked as a researcher at the Tilburg Law and Economics Center (TILEC), where he completed a PhD in anticorruption law.