Too Big to Prosecute and It’s Obama’s Fiscal Cliff – William K. Black
Bill Black: Criminal money laundering goes unpunished and Fiscal Cliff was created by Obama
Watch full multipart The Black Financial and Fraud Report:
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The Bill Black Financial and Fraud Report.
And Bill now joins us from Kansas City, where he is a professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He's a white-collar criminologist, a former financial regulator, and author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.
Thanks for joining us again, Bill.
BILL BLACK, ASSOC. PROF. ECONOMICS AND LAW, UMKC: Thank you.
JAY: So what are you following this week?
BLACK: Well, this week they’ve added UBS, the giant Swiss bank, to the ranks of the criminal enterprises that are admitting that they committed massive violations of the law. So, to review the bidding, HSBC, the largest bank in Europe, had for at least 15 years been violating the law in three areas. One, it was helping the most violent drug cartels in Mexico launder massive amounts of money. Two, it was helping nations like Iran and Sudan evade U.S. financial sanctions. And three, it was helping organizations the United States considers terrorist—Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda—evade financial sanctions.
Despite these massive violations, the United States Department of Justice said: not only will we not bring a criminal case against HSBC; we won’t bring it against its officers, and we won’t even bring it against former officers, because it’s too big to prosecute. And the newly appointed head of supervision, banking supervision in the United Kingdom, said, yes, that’s right; this entity is too big to prosecute. So we have the official insanity that they’ve decided that in the interest of banks’ stability, we need to leave felons in charge of the largest banks in the world.
Then came UBS. And UBS is an entity that’s been bailed out multiple times and also admitted to committing large-scale felonies in terms of tax evasion against the United States, where again it got a slap on the wrist. This time it got another fine and slap on the wrist.
But one entity, a Japanese affiliate, will be prosecuted and two individuals, both of them relatively down in the food chain, but one of whom while quite young making the mistake of emailing other employees engaged in the fraud. And this fraud was fixing the Libor rate—that’s the most important rate in the world, in which—a massive amount of financial contracts are priced off of that—and they engaged in just a naked cartel to fix the price of that Libor index. Well, this particular individual who’s being prosecuted sent emails to other people engaged in the fraud, urging them not to cooperate with the FBI investigation. And that of course got him on the list of we’re going to find a way to put you in prison. So two trivial guys and one obscure affiliate, but otherwise, UBS won’t be prosecuted either.
Keep reading: Black: Too Big to Prosecute and It’s Obama’s Fiscal Cliff.
