Dr Diana Johnson

• Qualifications:PhD, Solicitor, SFHEA, PGCertTLHE, PGDipLaw, PGDipLegal Practice, B.A.(Hons)
• Position:Senior Lecturer
• Department:Faculty of Business and Law (FBL)
• Telephone:+441173281326
• Email:Diana.Johnson@uwe.ac.uk

About me

I am a qualified Solicitor and a Senior Lecturer on the LLB. I am the module leader for the Commercial Law module on the LLB. I supervise LLM and PhD students.  

My research interests lie in financial crime and competition law. I am interested in corporate criminal liability, fraud, deferred prosecution agreements and criminal cartels. I have written several publications and presented conference papers on these topics.  In February 2025 my book Competition Law and Financial Crime (Routledge, 2025) was published, which examines how competition law can be used to enforce the financial crime of benchmark interest rate manipulation. It also examines in detail the difference between corporate criminal liability and whistleblowing mechanisms in the UK, EU and US.

I have worked as a co-investigator on an externally funded project for Innovate UK (£500,000 – Transform Suspicious Activity Reports: UK's First Technology Line of Defence) and am involved with teams bidding for further research funding. I have also received funding from the Higher Education Innovation Funding Scheme to set up an online Economic Crime Experts Directory.

I am a Steering Group Member of the South West Fraud Forum, an Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Economic Criminology for Elsevier and a Board member of the International Society of Economic Criminology. Within UWE Bristol, I co-lead the Financial Crime and Cyber Crime Research Network and am a member of the Global Crime, Justice and Security Research Group.

I am also a member of the Law Society of England and Wales, the White Collar Law Group and the Anti-Money Laundering, Cybersecurity and Financial Crime Compliance Network.

I have written and submitted evidence to policy makers and influential organisations including the Law Commission, the Financial Conduct Authority and HM Treasury.

Before working at UWE, I worked as a solicitor in the Corporate Department of the International law firm Osborne Clarke for four years, during which time I specialised in Mergers and Acquisitions, Private Equity and Corporate Restructurings. Prior to this, I worked in Brussels at both the European Commission (Directorate General for Competition) and the Brussels office of Taylor Wessing (International law firm).

Doctoral supervision 

Please contact me if you are interested in researching for a PhD in any area of financial crime or competition law.

Area of expertise

• Fraud
• Money Laundering
• Corporate Criminal Liability
• Deferred Prosecution Agreements
• UK, EU and US Competition law
• Cartels
• Whistleblowing

Publications

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