Legality Became an Operating Risk. Business ethics fails when incentive structures reward regulatory blindness

Business ethics becomes fragile when organizations treat legality as the outer boundary of responsibility rather than the beginning of judgment. This book frames Cum/Ex as an incentive system that converted complexity into cover. It examines how financial institutions, legal advisors, and market actors can drift from compliance into engineered harm while maintaining procedural confidence. Business ethics is tested where incentives, silence, and specialization meet.
The book focuses on decision layers: who understood the structure, who benefited from distance, and who allowed ambiguity to function as permission. Rather than reducing scandal to individual misconduct, it studies how risk cultures absorb moral tension until misconduct feels administratively normal. For European financial markets, the lesson is strategic: competitiveness without enforceable accountability damages institutional legitimacy, investor trust, and the public contract behind taxation.