Banking

Regulators Draw Flak Meant for Corporate Perps

When a mobster or street criminal declares “I was framed” and expresses disdain for police and prosecutors, we dismiss it as part of their sociopathic tendencies. Yet when corporate transgressors do essentially the same thing by criticizing government regulators, they are taken much more seriously. All too often, business perps succeed in portraying themselves as the victims.

This charade is being played out yet again amid the current wave of scandals involving major U.S. and British banks. In the latest case, Britain’s Standard Chartered has been accused by New York State banking regulator Benjamin Lawsky of scheming with the Iranian government to launder billions of dollars in funds that might have been used to support terrorist activists.

Rather than being outraged by the fact a major financial institution may very well have provided substantial material support to a regime that the governments of the United States and other western countries spend so much time vilifying, most of the criticism seems to be aimed at Lawsky.

Some of this criticism, not surprisingly, is coming from Standard Chartered itself, which insists that 99.9 percent of its dealings with Iranian parties were legitimate and that it was already cooperating with other regulatory agencies in investigating the matter. Those other agencies, including the Federal Reserve and the Office of Foreign Assets Control, seem to be siding with Standard Chartered. An article in the New York Times served as a conduit for allegations by unnamed federal officials seeking that Lawsky’s case was seriously flawed.

The accusations against Standard Chartered are hardly unprecedented. Only two months ago, the Justice Department announced that the Netherlands-based ING Bank had agreed to pay $619 million to settle charges of having violated federal law by systematically concealing prohibited transactions with Iran and Cuba. Last month, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report of more than 300 pages on the poor record of the British bank HSBC in avoiding money-laundering transactions linked to terrorism and drug dealing.

The unfriendly response to the Lawsky allegations is not just a matter of the usual tension between federal and New York State regulators when it comes to financial sector investigations. Disapproving comments have also come from officials in Britain, with one member of parliament making the ridiculous suggestion that anti-British bias was involved.

There’s something much larger at stake. We’re in the midst of an ongoing corporate crime wave, with major banks among the most prominent perpetrators. As the Times points out, large corporations are on track to pay as much as $8 billion this year to resolve allegations of defrauding the federal government, a record amount and more than twice the amount from last year.

We should be focusing our criticisms on the companies involved in these and other cases that have not yet reached the settlement stage—not the regulators and prosecutors trying to control the corporate misconduct.

If there is any criticism to be made of regulators, it is that too few of them resemble Lawsky. They are more likely to treat corporations with kid gloves, given that too many of them either come from the private sector or end up there after their stint in government. Or else they simply fail to take decisive action. In the other major financial scandal of the day—the manipulation of the LIBOR interest rate index by Barclays and other major banks—regulators such as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York knew of the abuses years ago and were slow to do anything. The inaction was brazenly used by former Barclays CEO Bob Diamond as a way of spreading the blame for the rate-rigging.

No discussion of regulation would be complete without mentioning the problem that many of the rules are too weak to begin with. The individual most responsible for this during the Obama Administration—Cass Sunstein—recently announced that he will be leaving the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to return to academia. An indication of the damage inflicted by Sunstein can be gauged by the fact that both the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce bemoaned his departure. Hopefully, Sunstein’s successor will make it harder for corporate malefactors to ply their trade.

Liar’s LIBOR

Mainstream economics would have us believe that interest rates are determined by the “invisible hand” of the market, except on those occasions when the Federal Reserve or other central banks intervene to modulate borrowing costs. One of the benefits of the current scandal embroiling the British bank Barclays is that it reveals the flimsy and fishy nature of one of the key rate-setting mechanisms of the global financial system.

That mechanism is the British Bankers’ Association’s London Interbank Offered Rate, an interest rate index that has been around since the 1980s. While LIBOR’s primary function is to represent what it costs big banks to borrow from one another over the short term, it has become the linchpin of hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial transactions ranging from complex interest-rate swaps to adjustable-rate home mortgages.

One would think that something so crucial to the efficient functioning of capitalism would be determined in a rigorous way. LIBOR rates, it turns out, are assembled in a remarkably arbitrary manner. They are based on figures submitted each day by major banks on what they think they would have to pay at that time to borrow in ten different currencies for 15 different periods of time. The upper and lower ends of the range are removed before the actual index is calculated by Thomson Reuters on behalf of the bankers’ association, but the figures are still based on what the banks decide to report as their perceptions.

While there has been debate since the beginning about the use of perceptions rather than actual transactions, serious questions about the integrity of LIBOR date back to the early stages of the financial meltdown in 2008. In April of that year the Wall Street Journal noted growing concerns that banks, whose individual LIBOR figures are made public, were adjusting those submissions downward to disguise the fact that their increasingly shaky condition was forcing them to pay higher rates for short-term loans.

The Journal then published its own analysis concluding that banks such as Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase, to avoid looking desperate for cash, had been reporting significantly lower borrowing costs to LIBOR than what other indicators suggested should have been the case.

By 2011, LIBOR discrepancies had moved from the realm of financial analysis to that of government oversight. The Swiss bank UBS disclosed that its LIBOR submissions were being reviewed by U.S. and Japanese regulators, and there were reports that other institutions were involved in the probes. It soon emerged that a group of megabanks were being investigated in various countries for colluding to manipulate the LIBOR rate. This, in turn, prompted a wave of lawsuits filed by institutional investors as well as by municipal governments whose interest rate swaps became less beneficial because of artificially low LIBOR rates.

Barclays is the first bank to be penalized for LIBOR shenanigans. The $453 million it is paying to U.S. and U.K. regulators to settle the case is more an embarrassment than a serious financial burden. Moreover, no executives or traders were charged, despite the smoking-gun emails quoted in the UK Financial Services Authority’s summary of the case. And, in an arrangement that is standard operating procedure for corporate miscreants these days, Barclays negotiated a deal with the U.S. Justice Department that allows it to avoid a criminal conviction.

It was satisfying to see the bank’s CEO Robert Diamond (phot0) forced to resign after the revelation of evidence suggesting that senior executives knew very well what was going on with the LIBOR manipulation. (Diamond, an American, also had to step down as a co-host of a fundraising event in London for Mitt Romney.) Yet we then had to put up with the ridiculous spectacle of Diamond testifying to a parliamentary committee that regulators were partly to blame.

The highlight of the hearing was when Labour MP John Mann told Diamond: “Either you were complicit, grossly negligent or incompetent.” After a pause, Diamond asked. “Is there a question?”

There is no question that the big banks are corrupt and that an interest-rate-setting system that depends on honest reporting by representatives of those institutions has no legitimacy.

Patriotism is for the Little People

ING’s “Your Number” ad campaign touts the financial services company’s ability to help customers figure out how much they need to save for retirement. We’ve just learned that ING’s own number is $619 million, the amount it had to pay to settle charges of having violated federal law by systematically concealing its prohibited transactions with Iran and Cuba.

The penalty agreed to by Netherlands-based ING is the largest in a series of cases in which major banks have been accused of doing business with countries targeted by U.S. economic sanctions. One of those banks is JPMorgan Chase, whose CEO Jamie Dimon just appeared before Congress to explain billions of dollars in trading losses and was treated with deference by most members of the Senate Banking Committee. It was just ten months ago that JPMorgan paid $88 million to resolve civil charges related to thousands of prohibited funds transfers for Iranian and Cuban parties.

JPMorgan got off a lot cheaper than some European banks, which were hit with criminal as well as civil charges. Apart from ING, Lloyds Banking Group paid $350 million in 2009, Credit Suisse paid $536 million that same year, and Barclays paid $298 million in 2010. Yet even those amounts did not cause much pain for the large institutions. In fact, they were undoubtedly happy to pay the penalties as part of arrangements that allowed them to avoid more serious legal consequences. They all were granted deferred prosecution deals under which they avoided a formal criminal conviction by vowing to clean up their act. A frustrated federal judge in the Barclays case called the settlement a “sweetheart deal” but approved it nonetheless.

The most comprehensive U.S. economic sanctions currently in force are aimed at Cuba, Iran, Burma/Myanmar, Sudan and Syria. More limited sanctions regimes apply to various other countries such as North Korea and Somalia. The Cuban sanctions, which date back to 1962, were adopted under the rubric of the World War I-era Trading with the Enemy Act. More recent restrictions are based primarily on the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1976.

Starting in the George W. Bush Administration, attention was directed from countries as a whole to designated individuals and organizations from those countries and others deemed to be acting against U.S. interests, including alleged terrorists and terrorist financiers. These parties are included in a list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC), which enforces the civil provisions of the sanctions laws.

Violations of these laws did not begin with the recent bank cases. In 2002 the Corporate Crime Reporter obtained documents from OFAC revealing previously unreported enforcement actions against companies such as Boeing, Citigroup, General Electric, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. The agency had brought 115 cases over a four-year period. Over the past decade, OFAC has been more open about its enforcement actions, but fewer U.S. companies are being targeted.

The reason is not that American firms have gotten more ethical, but rather because many of them have in effect been allowed to sidestep the law. In December 2010 the New York Times revealed that the Treasury Department has been granting licenses to many large companies to sell goods to Iran under an exceedingly broad interpretation of the agricultural and humanitarian exemptions. Among the products that sneaked in under those loopholes were cigarettes and chewing gum.

Whatever one thinks of the wisdom or efficacy of economic sanctions, the way in which large companies have related to them says a lot about corporate power. It’s clear that, whenever possible, they will put their commercial interests ahead of strict compliance with the law and adherence to the foreign policy objectives of their own government and those of its allies. When individuals collaborate with enemy nations they risk indefinite detention. When corporations do so, they receive affordable fines while avoiding serious legal consequences. Even admitted violators such as ING, Credit Suisse, Lloyds and Barclays do not end up on OFAC’s blacklist.

The late real estate tycoon Leona Helmsley once said that paying taxes is only for the little people; apparently, patriotism falls into the same category.