Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Global Banks in London's Canary Wharf
Yesterday, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office brought criminal charges against three more individuals in the matter of rigging the interest rate benchmark known as Libor. But the sum total of what we learned about those charges from the Serious Fraud Office are the following two sentences:
“Criminal proceedings by the Serious Fraud Office have commenced today against three former employees at Barclays Bank Plc, Peter Charles Johnson, Jonathan James Mathew and Stylianos Contogoulas, in connection with the manipulation of LIBOR. It is alleged they conspired to defraud between 1 June 2005 and 31 August 2007.”
There was no formal criminal complaint released to the press; no smoking gun emails; no transcripts of collusion in chat rooms. Just the above two sentences.
In the U.S., we are certainly not getting financial crimes by the big banks under control any better than the UK but at least we provide the public with an evidentiary basis for charging people or institutions with crimes (making sure, of course, that nobody at the top ever sees the inside of a jail cell). If the same charges had been leveled yesterday in the U.S., here’s how it would have gone down: the night before, the details of the charges and the most titillating emails would have been leaked to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. A press conference would have been preannounced and held in time to make the evening news. Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, would have shown up at the press conference with flip charts and flanked by at least one representative from the FBI.
Take the January 7 press conference to lay out the criminal charges against JPMorgan for facilitating Bernie Madoff’s fraud. Bharara’s press release was over 2300 words and the supporting documents with specific details of the crimes numbered more than 30 pages. (No individuals were charged and the bank was allowed to sign a deferred prosecution agreement – but, hey, the public got hundreds of sleazy, slimy, sordid details of how the crooks worked their scheme. We may not get justice in the U.S. but at least we get details.)
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