Courtesy of Pam Martens.
On Monday Reuters reported that “a judge in Mexico has issued an arrest warrant for the country head of U.S. investment bank JPMorgan for alleged fraud….” Details about the arrest warrant were provided the same day in a lawsuit filed in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. The lawsuit explained that “…a prosecutor has conducted a criminal investigation into fraud by J.P. Morgan. Based on the preliminary evidence collected, the prosecutor recently (in June 2018) requested that a judge detain Eduardo Cepeda, the chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Defendant’s Mexican unit, and former J.P. Morgan managing director Miguel Barbosa. Upon review of the evidence presented by the prosecutor, a criminal court judge has found the elements of felony fraud in the amount of $100 million, and issued a detention order for Eduardo Cepeda and Miguel Barbosa.”
That was this past Monday. By Wednesday, Reuters was reporting the following: “A judge in Mexico canceled an arrest warrant for the country head of U.S. investment bank JPMorgan Chase & Co and another employee, the bank said on Wednesday, just days after it was issued.”
Exactly how does one get a judge to rescind an arrest warrant after an alleged finding of “felony fraud in the amount of $100 million”? We’ll get to the details of the alleged fraud in a moment, but first a bit of historical perspective on JPMorgan Chase’s decade-long crime spree.
Peculiar things happen a lot where JPMorgan Chase is involved. Crimes are routinely committed, tens of billions of dollars are paid in fines, the bank admits to three felony counts in a two year period, it gambles in exotic derivatives with its bank depositors’ money and loses $6.2 billion – and yet, no executive ever goes to jail and CEO Jamie Dimon not only keeps his job but keeps getting big pay raises, moving him now onto the Forbes billionaire list.
Two of the felony counts against JPMorgan Chase came in 2014 for its involvement in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. The third felony count came in 2015 for its involvement in rigging foreign exchange markets. In 2013 JPMorgan Chase paid a $13 billion settlement with the Justice Department and Federal and State regulators for its role in selling investors subprime mortgage products as worthy investments when the bank had good reason to believe they would blow up.
The sheer volume of JPMorgan Chase’s crime spree led two trial lawyers, Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer, to write a book on the bank, comparing it to the Gambino crime family. In addition to the above settlements, the lawyers outlined a broad pattern of nefarious behavior at the bank:
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