Corporate Crime

When Will the Big Banks Be Reined In?

In case anyone had doubts about the venality of the big U.S. banks, some recent news reports provide indisputable proof.

First, David Kocieniewski of the New York Times wrote a mind-boggling front-page report on how Goldman Sachs has been using a metals storage company to move large quantities of aluminum from one warehouse to another in Detroit. The maneuver, which exploits esoteric rules of the London Metal Exchange, generates millions of dollars in profit for Goldman and pushes up the price of products such as soft drinks sold in aluminum cans.

The creation of paper profits from aluminum shuffling is just one of the various ways that banks manipulate commodity prices. Occasionally they are called to task for their actions. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission just announced that JPMorgan Chase would pay $410 million in penalties and disgorgement to ratepayers to settle charges that it manipulated electricity markets in California and the Midwest several years ago. The announcement came shortly after the agency ordered the British bank Barclays and four of its traders to pay $453 million in civil penalties in connection with similar abuses in the western United States.

Apparently these banks decided that Enron’s energy market manipulation from a decade earlier was a game plan rather than a cautionary tale.

Another Times piece reports that major banks have in effect blacklisted more than a million low-income Americans because their names appear in databases of supposedly risky customers. The article highlights a Brooklyn woman who ended up on such a list after she overdrew her checking account by all of $40 in 2010 and subsequently was turned down by numerous banks when she tried to open an account. Many of the blacklisted people had to resort to exploitative check-cashing services and payday lenders to conduct their financial transactions. Among the subscribers to ChexSystems, the largest of the databases, were said to be Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.

Allow that to sink it. Banks that have been involved in multi-billion-dollar scandals involving the deceptive sale of toxic securities, municipal bond bid rigging, foreclosure abuses and the like decide that it is too risky to take on a customer who once had a two-digit overdraft in her checking account.

For institutions such as these, the only proper response is to play as dirty as they do. A third NYT article reports that the city of Richmond, California is doing exactly that by employing its power of eminent domain to take over occupied homes that are under the threat of foreclosure and instead offer the owners new, more affordable mortgages that reflect the diminished value of the property. The banks, which have dragged their feet on foreclosure reforms, are indignant over the move and are, in the words of the Times, threatening to “bring down a hail of lawsuits and all but halt mortgage lending in any city with the temerity” to consider the tactic.

The need for bold tactics such as eminent domain has been brought about not only by the banks but also by the half-hearted efforts of the Obama Administration to deal with the foreclosure crisis. This is just one of the ways the administration has not held the financial industry fully responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008 and the repercussions that are still with us.

The President himself is spending his time these days lobbying Congress to support the selection of Larry Summers as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. This is the same Summers who, as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, promoted the financial deregulation that helped usher in the bank recklessness that has done so much harm to the economy.

The Wall Street Journal recently revealed for the first time that Summers has been working as a consultant to Citigroup in addition to his previously reported roles advising a hedge fund, a venture capital firm and a money management company. Obama apparently thinks that someone with this kind of track record is well suited to oversee monetary policy as the head of an agency that is also one of the main banking regulators.

I’m more impressed with the public officials in Richmond, California.

R.I.P. for SAC?

SAC indictment It’s not clear what real value hedge funds add to the economy, but the apparent abuses of Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors have made one significant though unintentional contribution: They have breathed new life into the concept of a corporate death penalty.

The criminal and civil charges just filed against SAC by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan for insider trading could very well lead to the demise of the firm, given that prosecutors are reportedly seeking forfeiture of some $10 billion. In fact, some analysts believe that forcing SAC out of business is the primary goal of the feds.

In recent years, federal prosecutors have appeared to do everything possible to avoid prosecutions of even the most egregious companies if the case threatened their viability. This has allowed many of the big banks to avoid major criminal charges for their role in the financial meltdown, money laundering or LIBOR interest rate manipulation.

Those that have faced charges have never been in danger of going under, given their ability to negotiate deferred prosecution agreements or the application of criminal charges to a minor subsidiary. Some of the penalties have been sizable (e.g. $1.9 billion for HSBC and $1.5 billion for UBS) but not big enough to sink them.

SAC is a different story. A $10 billion penalty would cripple the firm, which has already been experiencing a rapid outflow of assets since the insider trading charges first surfaced and SAC paid $616 million last March to settle civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Prosecutors don’t have to worry about broad economic consequences of an SAC collapse. Some negative ripple effects might be felt in Stamford, Connecticut, where the firm is headquartered, but there are plenty of other wealthy firms and individuals there to generate business for luxury car dealers and the high-end service sector.

The fact that a firm such as SAC could disappear without causing any significant disruption raises the question of what purpose it serves in the first place.

Hedge funds have been around for decades, but they used to be low-profile firms serving a limited clientele of wealthy individuals. During the 1990s hedge funds came out of the shadows. Hordes of young investment professionals like Steven Cohen left the stodgy confines of Wall Street and opened their own hedge funds. No longer satisfied with the prospect of becoming a mere millionaire at a brokerage firm, these hotshots saw the chance to become multimillionaires through esoteric investment techniques beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.

The dream of unlimited wealth was shaken in 1998, when a hedge fund called Long-Term Capital Management—which had used $2.2 billion in assets to acquire financial positions with a value of more than $1 trillion—was on the verge of collapse. Concerned that a failure of this magnitude would weaken the entire financial market, the Federal Reserve intervened by putting together a group of investment banks that bailed out the hedge fund and its rich investors.

Events such as this tarnished the reputation of hedge funds but did not result in a stampede among their clients, which included a growing number of pension funds. In fact, the sluggish performance of the stock market in the wake of the dot.com collapse made affluent investors even more interested in the extraordinary returns that hedge funds seemed to offer.

Despite the hype in the business press about funds pulling in annual returns of 40 percent or more, many hedge funds struggled to outperform the stock market. Looking for the big score, some turned back the clock to the financial maneuvers of the 1980s. Rather than simply engaging in financial plays, they used their holdings in companies to press for corporate restructuring to pump up the stock price or in some cases bought out the firm entirely in order to reshape it. Hedge fund managers began to behave like the corporate raiders of the 1980s, and some of those raiders, such as Carl Icahn, transformed themselves into hedge fund managers.

Yet even these approaches could not provide levels of return high enough to meet the inflated expectations of hedge fund investors. All the evidence suggests that firms such as SAC decided that the only way to beat the market was to obtain information that no one else had; in other words, by resorting to insider trading.

That was the message of the successful prosecution of Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam in 2011 and is also at the heart of the SAC indictment, which alleges not just some isolated instances of insider trading. Instead, it charges that such behavior was inherent in the way SAC has operated:

The relentless pursuit of an information “edge” fostered a business culture within SAC in which there was no meaningful commitment to ensure that such “edge” came from legitimate research and not Inside Information. The predictable and foreseeable result, as charged herein, was systematic insider trading.

If SAC’s goose is indeed cooked, the next issue is what happens to its competitors. There’s no reason to believe that any of the other big hedge funds have been any more scrupulous in their pursuit of an information edge. Perhaps what we should be talking about here is not just the death penalty for a single company but for an entire industry.

China’s Familiar Charges Against Glaxo

big-pharma-pills-and-money Global corporations piously claim to adhere to the laws of the countries in which they do business, knowing full well that those laws in many places are weak or are not rigorously enforced.

It’s thus amusing to see British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline squirm in the face of corruption charges unexpectedly brought by the Chinese government. GSK purports to be shocked by allegations that its Chinese executives used funds laundered through travel agencies to bribe doctors, hospitals and public officials to purchase more of its products. The company insists that it has zero tolerance for such behavior and that a recent internal investigation had found no evidence of corruption in its Chinese operations.

These protestations are as unconvincing as the Chinese government’s claims that it is simply enforcing the law—as opposed to giving its emerging pharmaceutical industry a leg up. GSK’s alleged transgressions are little different from the practices that it and the rest of Big Pharma employ around the world.

Take the United States. In recent years, GSK has become known as the company that pays massive amounts to resolve wide-ranging allegations brought by regulators and prosecutors.

Some of those charges involved payments very much like the ones it is being accused of making in China. GSK was charged with giving kickbacks to doctors and other health professionals to prescribe drugs such as the anti-depressants Paxil and Wellbutrin for unapproved (and possibly dangerous) purposes. Payments also went to figures such as radio personality Drew Pinsky, who was given $275,000 by the company to promote Wellbutrin on his program.

The kickback allegations were among the charges covered by a $3 billion settlement GSK reached with the U.S. Justice Department in 2012. Also included in the deal were accusations that GSK withheld crucial safety data on its diabetes medication Avandia from the Food & Drug Administration and that it defrauded government healthcare programs in its pricing practices.

These safety and pricing matters were the culmination of years of controversy surrounding GSK and its predecessor companies. The safety issues dated back at least to the 1950s, when Smith, Kline & French was among the firms linked to Thalidomide and its horrible legacy of birth defects.

Until it was sold off in the late 1980s, Glaxo’s infant formula business, like that of Nestle, was accused of undermining public health in the third world by marketing the powder to women who were so poor that they tended to dilute the formula to the point that it lost its nutritional potency.

In the 1980s, SmithKline Beckman was the target of a rare criminal case brought under U.S. drug laws for failing to warn regulators and the public about the potentially lethal side effects of its blood pressure medication Selacryn.

Later years saw frequent charges that GSK suppressed evidence about the dangers of Paxil, especially in children. There were also many cases involving pricing abuses, including one in which GSK paid $150 million to resolve allegations of violating the federal False Claims Act in its dealings with Medicare and Medicaid.

Unlike many corporate settlements, GSK’s $3 billion deal with the feds required it to plead guilty to several criminal counts. It also had to sign a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services.

In other words, the company is in effect on parole and subject to heightened scrutiny. The Chinese accusations seem to point to a big, fat violation of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That would jeopardize GSK’s settlement and subject it to new penalties and sanctions.

Foreign corporations have long taken advantage of China’s lax regulatory system. Now that the People’s Republic is (selectively) cracking down, a company such as GSK deserves no sympathy.

The Kochs’ Stake in Pollution

Accountability_LATimesPuppets_300x250_FINALREVISED050813_2 Koch Industries and the billionaire brothers who run it are best known for their involvement in rightwing causes. The latest controversy is over the Kochs’ reported interest in purchasing the Los Angeles Times and other major newspapers owned by the Tribune Co. A campaign centered in L.A. is mobilizing opposition to such a deal among newspaper subscribers and Tribune shareholders, warning that a Koch takeover would create a new Fox News.

What often gets forgotten is that Koch Industries is not just part of the Koch ideological machine. It is a huge privately-held conglomerate with annual revenues of more than $100 billion and operations ranging from oil pipelines and refining to paper products (it owns Georgia-Pacific), synthetic fibers (it bought Lyrca and Stainmaster producer Invista from DuPont), chemicals, mining and cattle ranching.

I’ve just completed one of my Corporate Rap Sheets on Koch Industries, and it’s clear that the sins of the company go far beyond the political realm. The following is some of what I found.

In November 2011 the magazine Bloomberg Markets published a lengthy article entitled “The Secret Sins of Koch Industries” that made some explosive accusations against the company: “For six decades around the world, Koch Industries has blazed a path to riches—in part, by making illicit payments to win contracts, trading with a terrorist state, fixing prices, neglecting safety and ignoring environmental regulations. At the same time, Charles and David Koch have promoted a form of government that interferes less with company actions.”

What Bloomberg revealed for the first time were the allegations involving bribery and dealing with Iran. The article reported that the company’s subsidiary Koch-Glitsch paid bribes to secure contracts in six countries (Algeria, Egypt, India, Morocco, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia) and that it violated U.S. sanctions by doing business with Iran, including the sale of materials that helped the country build the world’s largest plant to convert natural gas to methanol used in plastics, paints and chemicals.

The environmental cases alluded to by Bloomberg had been previously reported and included the following.

In 1995 the U.S Justice Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the United Stated Coast Guard filed a civil suit against Koch Industries and several of its affiliates for unlawfully discharging millions of gallons of oil into the waters of six states. In one of the largest Clean Water Act cased ever brought up to that time, the agencies accused Koch of being responsible for more than 300 separate spills in Alabama, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and Texas.

In 1997 Tosco Corporation (now part of ConocoPhillips) sued Koch in a dispute over costs related to the clean-up of toxic waste at an oil refinery in Duncan, Oklahoma that used to be owned and operated by Koch. In 1998 a federal judge ordered Koch to contribute to those costs, and that ruling was upheld by an appeals court in 2000. The companies later settled the matter out of court.

In 1998 Koch agreed to pay $6.9 million to settle charges brought by state environmental regulators relating to large oil spills at the company’s Rosemount refinery in Minnesota. The following year it agreed to plead guilty to related federal criminal charges and pay $8 million in fines.

Also in 1998, the National Transportation Safety Board found that the failure of a Koch subsidiary to protect a liquid butane pipeline from corrosion was responsible for a 1996 rupture that released a butane vapor. When a pickup truck drove into the vapor it ignited an explosion that killed the driver and a passenger. In a wrongful death lawsuit a Texas jury awarded the father of one of the victims $296 million in damages.

In 2000 the U.S. Justice Department and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay what was then a record civil environmental fine of $30 million to settle the 1995 charges relating to more than 300 oil spills plus additional charges filed in 1997. Along with the penalty, Koch agreed to spend $5 million on environmental projects in Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, the states where most of its spills had occurred. In announcing the settlement, EPA head Carol Browner said that Koch had quit inspecting its pipelines and instead found flaws by waiting for ruptures to happen.

Later in 2000, DOJ and the EPA announced that Koch Industries would pay a penalty of $4.5 million in connection with Clean Air Act violations at its refineries in Minnesota and Texas. The company also agreed to spend up to $80 million to install improved pollution-control equipment at the facilities.

In a third major environmental case against Koch that year, a federal grand jury in Texas returned a 97-count indictment against the company and four of its employees for violating federal air pollution and hazardous waste laws in connection with benzene emissions at the Koch refinery near Corpus Christi.

The Bloomberg Markets article reported that a former Koch employee said she was told to falsify data in a report to the state on the emissions. The company was reportedly facing potential penalties of some $350 million, but in early 2001 the newly installed Bush Administration’s Justice Department negotiated a settlement in which many of the charges were dropped and the company pled guilty to concealing violations of air quality laws and paid just $10 million in criminal fines and $10 million for environmental projects in the Corpus Christi area.

With the purchase of Georgia-Pacific in 2005, Koch acquired a company with its own environmental and safety problems. For example, in 1984 a G-P plant in Columbus, Ohio had spilled 2,000 pounds of phenol and formaldehyde that reached a nearby community. Residents complained of health problems from that incident and from a huge industrial waste pond that the company continued to maintain at the plant.

In 2009 the U.S. Justice Department and the EPA announced that G-P would spend $13 million to perform clean-up activities at a Michigan Superfund site where it previously had a paper mill. In 2010 G-P was one of ten companies sued by the Justice Department over PCB contamination of the Fox River in Wisconsin. Unlike the other defendants, G-P had already settled with DOJ by agreeing to a $7 million penalty and to pay for the costs of a portion of the clean-up. One of the other defendants, Appleton Papers, called the settlement a “sweetheart deal.”

More recently, Koch Industries has been caught up in the controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline. In 2011 Inside Climate News reported that Koch already responsible for 25 percent of the tar sands oil being imported from Canada into the United States and stood to benefit greatly from the new pipeline. Koch denied its involvement, but Inside Climate News found documents filed with Canada’s Energy Board contradicting that statement.

An August 2012 report by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst identified Koch as being among the top five corporate air polluters in the United States.

The reason the Kochs rail against regulation is clear: they’ve got a big stake in pollution.

Note: The full rap sheet on Koch Industries can be found here.

JPMorgan Chase in the Sewer

dimon The business news has been full of speculation on whether JPMorgan Chase Jamie Dimon will go on serving as both CEO and chairman of the big bank, in light of a shareholder campaign to strip him of the latter post. The effort to bring Dimon down a notch—and to oust three members of the board—is hardly the work of a “lynch mob,” as Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale suggested in a New York Times op-ed.

That’s not to say that a corporate lynching is not in order. JPMorgan’s behavior has been outrageous in many respects. The latest evidence has just come to light in a lawsuit filed by California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who accuses the bank of engaging in “fraudulent and unlawful debt-collection practices” against tens of thousands of residents of her state.

In charges reminiscent of the scandals involving improper foreclosures by the likes of JPMorgan, the complaint describes gross violations of proper legal procedures in the course of filing vast numbers of lawsuits against borrowers, including:

Robo-signing of court filings without proper review of relevant files and bank records;
Failing to properly serve notice on customers—a practice known as “sewer service”; and
Failing to redact personal information from court filings, potentially exposing customers to identity theft.

JPMorgan got so carried away with what the complaint calls its “debt collection mill,” that on a single day in 2010 it filed 469 lawsuits.

The accusations come amid reports of ongoing screw-ups in the process of providing compensation to victims of the foreclosure abuses. For JPMorgan, the California charges also bring to mind its own dismal record when it comes to respecting the rights of credit card customers.

In January 2001, just before it was taken over by what was then J.P. Morgan, Chase Manhattan had to pay at least $22 million to settle lawsuits asserting that its credit card customers were charged illegitimate late fees.

In July 2012 JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $100 million to settle a class action lawsuit charging it with improperly increasing the minimum monthly payments charged to credit card customers.

The credit card abuses are only part of a broad pattern of misconduct by JPMorgan. In the past year alone, its track record includes the following:

In October 2012 New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, acting on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department’s federal mortgage task force, sued JPMorgan, alleging that its Bear Stearns unit had fraudulently misled investors in the sale of residential mortgage-backed securities. The following month, the SEC announced that JPMorgan would pay $296.9 million to settle similar charges.

In January 2013 JPMorgan was one of ten major lenders that agreed to pay a total of $8.5 billion to resolve charges relating to foreclosure abuses. That same month, bank regulators ordered JPMorgan to take corrective action to address risk management shortcomings that caused massive trading losses in the London Whale scandal. It was also ordered to strengthen its efforts to prevent money laundering. In a move that was interpreted as a signal to regulators, JPMorgan’s board of directors cut the compensation of Dimon by 50 percent.

JPMorgan’s image was further tarnished by an internal probe of the big trading losses that found widespread failures in the bank’s risk management system. Investigations of the losses by the FBI and other federal agencies continue.

In February 2013 documents came to light indicating JPMorgan had altered the results of an outside analysis showing deficiencies in thousands of home mortgages that the bank had bundled into securities that turned out to be toxic.

In March 2013 the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigation released a 300-page report that charged the bank with ignoring internal controls and misleading regulators and shareholders about the scope of losses associated with the London Whale fiasco.

In an article in late March, the New York Times reported that the bank was facing investigations by at least eight federal agencies. Last week, the newspaper revealed a new investigation of JPMorgan by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which was said to have assembled evidence that the bank used “manipulative schemes” to transform money-losing power plants into “powerful profit centers.”

You know a bank is in big trouble when the coverage of its activities includes phrases like “lynch mob,” “sewer service” and “manipulative schemes.“

The Banking Dirty Dozen: A Cheat Sheet

JPM-bankster With the posting of a dossier on Barclays, the inventory of Corporate Rap Sheets on the banking industry now stands at twelve. Looked at together, the track records of these major financial institutions since the mid-2000s amounts to one of the most brazen corporate crime waves in the entire history of capitalism.

The dirty dozen includes six banks based in the United States (Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo); three in the United Kingdom (Barclays, HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland); two in Switzerland (Credit Suisse and UBS); and one in Germany (Deutsche Bank).

Although the prosecution of their crimes has been far from adequate, quite a few cases have been brought by a variety of agencies and plaintiffs. The charges have also been wide-ranging: from investor deception and mortgage abuses to violation of economic sanctions and the facilitation of tax evasion and money laundering.

Even if we limit the universe to those cases in which there was a penalty or settlement worth $100 million or more, the list presented below comes to more than three dozen. The recoveries in these megacases add up to an astounding $82 billion (including mandated repurchases of securities and mortgage modifications). And this figure does not include many large cases that remain unresolved—not to mention the cases that have yet to be brought.

Beyond the numbers, it is difficult to say what all this amounts to. The penalties, while substantial in comparison to those imposed in the past, do not seem to be serving as much of a deterrent against the reckless and unscrupulous business practices that gave rise to the financial meltdown just a few years ago.

The answer may be that the penalties need to be much larger, so that they force crooked banks to taken more drastic actions such as selling off major assets. Or it may be that changes are necessary to those tax code provisions that allow banks (and other corporations) to deduct many of these penalties. Another possibility is that only more aggressive criminal prosecutions of both banks and their executives will get them to clean up their act. Other remedies such as charter revocations also need to be given new consideration.

One way or another, the banking crime wave needs to be brought to an end.

MEGACASES INVOLVING THE BANKING DIRTY DOZEN DISCUSSED IN THEIR CORPORATE RAP SHEETS

Deceiving investors

Bank of America (SEC cases re Merrill Lynch): $183 million (2009 and 2010)
Bank of America (class actions re Merrill Lynch): $2.7 billion (2011 and 2012)
Bank of America (re securities sold to Fannie Mae): $10.3 billion (2013)
Citigroup: $285 million (2011)
Citigroup: $590 million (2012)
Citigroup (class action): $730 million (2013)
Credit Suisse: $120 million (2012)
Goldman Sachs: $550 million (2010)
JPMorgan Chase: $153 million (2011)
Wells Fargo: $125 million (2011)

Disputes with purchasers of auction rate securities

Deutsche Bank: $1.3 billion (2009)
UBS: $18.2 billion (2008 and 2010)
Wells Fargo: $1.4 billion (2009)

Mortgage and foreclosure abuses

Bank of America (re Countrywide Financial): $463 million (2010 and 2011)
Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo (and Ally Financial): $25 billion (2012)
Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and six others): $8.5 billion (2013)
Goldman Sachs: $330 million (2013)
HSBC: $249 million (2013)
Morgan Stanley (re Saxon Mortgage Services): $227 million (2013)
Wells Fargo (racial discrimination): $175 million (2012)
Wells Fargo: $2 billion (2010)

Defrauding of federal government regarding mortgage insurance

Citigroup: $158 million (2012)
Deutsche Bank: $202 million (2012)

Municipal bond bid rigging and illegal payments

Bank of America: $137 million (2010)
JPMorgan Chase: $747 million (2009)
JPMorgan Chase: $228 million (2011)
UBS: $160 million (2011)
Wells Fargo: $148 million (2011)

Manipulation of the LIBOR interest rate index

Barclays: $450 million (2012)
Royal Bank of Scotland: $612 million (2013)
UBS: $1.5 billion (2012)

Facilitation of tax evasion and money laundering by customers

Deutsche Bank: $553 million (2010)
HSBC: $1.3 billion (2012)
UBS: $780 million (2009)

Violations of economic sanctions regarding countries such as Iran

Barclays: $298 million (2010)
Credit Suisse: $536 million (2009)
Royal Bank of Scotland (re ABN AMRO): $500 million (2010)

Improper increases in credit card minimum monthly payments

JPMorgan Chase: $100 million (2012)

Manipulation of electricity markets

Barclays: $470 million (2012)

Ending the Corporate Crime Wave

Stop Corporate Crime The top executives of giant corporations may still effectively be immune from criminal prosecution for their misdeeds, but the financial penalties imposed on their companies by regulators are beginning to be felt in the bottom line. The question is whether plunging profits are enough to get corporate malefactors to clean up their act.

In February, the Swiss bank UBS posted a quarterly loss of $2.1 billion (and an annual loss of more than $2.7 billion), largely reflecting the $1.5 billion it paid to resolve charges brought by U.S., Swiss and British prosecutors in connection with the bank’s role in manipulating the LIBOR interest rate index.

Recently, the British bank HSBC reported a 17 percent decline in profits brought about to a great extent by the $1.9 billion in penalties it had to pay to resolve allegations by U.S. regulators that its lax internal controls against money laundering aided customers with links to drug trafficking and terrorism.

Oil giant BP noted that its 2012 results were affected by a “net adverse impact” of more than $5 billion relating to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, for which the company had to pay $4 billion to resolve charges brought by U.S. prosecutors.

GlaxoSmithKline’s announcement of 2012 results noted that its net cash flow was depressed by the cost of legal settlements, including the $3 billion it had to pay the federal government to resolve allegations of illegal marketing of prescription drugs, withholding of crucial safety data and other abuses. GSK went so far as to include a figure for cash flow “before legal settlements” similar to the way companies like to show results before interest, taxes and depreciation to make their performance look better.

It will be interesting to see how institutional investors regard these material financial impacts. Corporations have been breaking the law for a long time, and the penalties they incur have come to be seen as a routine cost of doing business. Many corporate critics thus tend to downplay their significance and instead press for more criminal prosecutions. That chorus has just intensified with a statement by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that some banks have grown so large that it is difficult to prosecute them.

It is worth noting, however, that all of the cases cited above contained criminal elements. A Japanese subsidiary of UBS pleaded guilty to a felony wire fraud charge. HSBC, the Justice Department said, “accepted responsibility for its criminal conduct and that of its employees” and was offered a deferred prosecution agreement. A BP unit pleaded guilty to felony manslaughter, environmental crimes and obstruction of Congress. GSK pleaded guilty to a three-count criminal information and consented to enter into a corporate integrity agreement with the federal government.

What was missing, of course, were criminal prosecutions of high-level executives in the firms, who presumably had ultimate responsibility for the misdeeds.

I agree that chief executives should be made to pay a stiff personal price for the anti-social practices of their organizations, but I’m not entirely convinced that putting some of them behind bars would be a foolproof deterrent against corporate misconduct. After all, plenty of businesspeople have gone to prison for insider trading, yet the practice never seems to end.

Financial sanctions may be more effective if the trend toward larger penalties is escalated even further. The wave of billion-dollar settlements may be causing some pain, but the companies—especially huge and highly profitable ones like BP—will easily recover. Penalties for serious offenses need to be raised to the point that they force the company to take drastic action, such as selling off major assets. Or the government could directly seize those assets, as some were urging in the wake of the BP disaster in the gulf.

There would undoubtedly be a major backlash from business interests to a policy of imposing penalties that threaten the survival of companies. Yet the alternative is to go on living amid a perpetual corporate crime wave.

Note: My latest Corporate Rap Sheet is on HSBC, covering both the big penalty cited above and the other scandals surrounding the bank. It can be found here.

Violating the Norm at Deutsche Bank

Layout 1 Corporate annual meetings and the publication of company annual reports usually come off like clockwork. Deutsche Bank, however, has found itself in the awkward position of having to call an extraordinary general meeting and delay the issuance of its annual financial documents until after that event.

These unusual measures are symptoms of the disarray of the giant German financial institution as it copes with a series of legal complications stemming from its own ethical shortcomings.

The special meeting was necessitated by a court ruling that invalidated votes that had been taken at last year’s scheduled shareholder gathering. That ruling came as the result of a legal challenge brought by the heirs of German media tycoon Leo Kirch, who blame the bank for forcing his company into bankruptcy.

There’s a silver lining in this for Deutsche Bank management, since the delay in the publication of the annual report (and the 20-F filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) means that it will have more time before it needs to give more details about the various legal messes it is in.

It’s not easy keeping track of them all. Deutsche Bank’s reputation has been tarnished in a variety of ways. This is not to say that the bank’s image started off spotless. It did, after all, actively collaborate with the Nazi regime, helping appropriate the assets of financial institutions in conquered countries.

The sins were not all in the distant past. In 1999 Deutsche Bank acquired New York-based Bankers Trust, which was embroiled in a scandal over its diversion of unclaimed customer assets into its own accounts; it had to pay a $60 million fine and plead guilty to criminal charges.

Deutsche Bank itself was then the subject of wide-ranging investigations of its role in helping wealthy customers, especially those from the U.S., engage in tax evasion. The bank was featured in an investigative report on offshore tax abuses issued by a U.S. Senate committee and was eventually charged by federal prosecutors. In 2010 it had to pay $553 million and admit to criminal wrongdoing to resolve allegations that it participated in transactions that promoted fraudulent tax shelters and generated billions of dollars in U.S. tax losses.

That did not put an end to Deutsche Bank’s tax evasion woes. It is currently reported to be the subject of an investigation by German prosecutors of tax dodging through the use of carbon credits. In December, the bank’s German offices were raided by some 500 police officers seeking evidence for the probe.

Deutsche Bank is also widely reported to be under investigation for its role in the manipulation of the LIBOR interest rate index. There has been speculation that the bank’s co-chief executive, Anshu Jain, might lose his job over the issue. Lower-level employees of the bank have already been disciplined.

There’s more. Deutsche Bank is one of the firms that were sued by the U.S. Federal Housing Finance Agency for abuses in the sale of mortgage-backed securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the case is pending). Last year, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York announced that Deutsche Bank would pay $202 million to settle charges that its MortgageIT unit had repeatedly made false certifications to the U.S. Federal Housing Administration about the quality of mortgages to qualify them for FHA insurance coverage.

In January Deutsche Bank agreed to pay a $1.5 million fine to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to settle charges that it had manipulated energy markets in California in 2010.

Deutsche Bank’s misconduct goes beyond the realm of finance. The bank is being targeted by labor activists in Las Vegas, where it owns two casinos. Members of UNITE HERE have been picketing the bank’s Cosmopolitan casino over management’s insistence on weakening standard industry work rules during negotiations on the union’s first contract at the site. As part of its organizing drive, UNITE HERE created a website called Deutsche Bank Risk Alert to highlight the negative issues surrounding the casino’s parent. It has not lacked for content.

Note: This piece draws from my new Corporate Rap Sheet on Deutsche Bank, which can be found here.

The Golden Gag and Other Sins of Novartis

vasella Novartis raked in more than $12 billion in profits last year, but it was a planned expenditure of $78 million that prompted an uprising by the Swiss drug giant’s shareholders and compelled the company’s management to make an embarrassing about-face. The reason is that the $78 million was an unwarranted giveaway to the retiring chairman.

In January, Novartis announced that Daniel Vasella (photo) would leave the company after serving in top positions for the past 17 years. Vasella had already been granted more than $12 million in retirement benefits after he gave up the chief executive’s post in 2010 while staying on the board of directors as chairman with another $12 million in additional annual compensation. That payout was highly controversial, coming after years of fat CEO paychecks for Vasella.

It also set the stage for the current scandal, which grew out of a plan to pay Vasella not to work for another pharmaceutical company for the next six years. The non-competition agreement is referred to in the European press as a “golden gag” arrangement.

The pent up anger against Vasella was obvious in the reaction to the announcement. The corporate accountability group Ethos called on shareholders to withhold their support for the re-election of members of the board’s compensation committee. One Swiss official denounced the payment, saying “it does huge damage to the social cohesion in our country.” A lawyer in Zurich filed a criminal complaint against Novartis, the compensation committee and Vasella for breach of trust and lying to shareholders. A public statement by Vasella that he would donate the money to charity did little to quell the uproar.

The subsequent decision by Novartis to drop the plan was a significant victory for corporate accountability activists and critics of excessive executive and director pay, who have been targeting bloated compensation not only at Novartis but also at other large Swiss companies.

What’s ironic, however, is that this planned parting payment to Vasella generated a lot more controversy than other, arguably more serious sins of the company during his tenure, especially those committed in its U.S. operations.

For example, in 2010 Novartis had to pay $422 million to U.S. authorities to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from charges that it engaged in illegal marketing of its epilepsy drug Trileptal, including the payment of kickbacks to doctors to get them to prescribe the medication for off-label and potentially dangerous purposes.

That same year, Eon Laboratories, a Novartis subsidiary, agreed to pay $3.5 million to settle allegations that it violated the U.S. False Claims Act by submitting inaccurate reports to the federal government that obscured the fact that the Food and Drug Administration had found that the company’s Nitroglycerin Sustained Release capsules lacked substantial evidence of effectiveness.

In 2005 a Novartis U.S. unit, OPI Properties, had agreed to pay $49.2 million in civil and criminal fines and be excluded from federal healthcare contracts to resolve charges relating to its improper marketing of nutritional products to the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

In 2005 a group of women who had worked as sales representatives for Novartis in the United States filed a lawsuit against the company, saying they were discriminated against in pay and promotions, especially after becoming pregnant. In 2010 a federal jury ruled in favor of the women, awarding them $3.3 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages. Novartis appealed and then settled the case for $152 million.

Novartis has also been at the center of a worldwide controversy over the pricing of its cancer medication Gleevec (Glivec in Europe), a year’s supply of which in the early 2000s was priced at about $27,000. Novartis sought to quiet the criticism by promising to give the drug away to many of those who could not afford it, but in 2003 it was reported that the effort was falling far short of expectations.

Novartis later found itself in a battle with the Indian government, which rejected the company’s patent application for Gleevec as part of its effort to encourage the production of low-cost generic drugs for poor countries. A wide range of non-governmental organizations, such as Doctors Without Borders and the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, called on Novartis to drop its suit, which was heard by the Indian Supreme Court in 2012.

Novartis was right to cancel its big giveaway to Vasella, but the company has a lot more to answer for.

Note: The latest addition to my Corporate Rap Sheets collection is dossier number 41, describing the track record of another ethically challenged Swiss company, Credit Suisse.

UBS’s Ill-Fated Quest for Financial Glory

UBS UBS seems to be in the news these days more often in connection with its legal problems than in its role as a major financial services company.

This is a result both of some dubious cases brought against it and numerous instances of serious misconduct on the part of the Swiss company. UBS, after all, a corporation that not long ago had to pay $1.5 billion to settle charges that it helped manipulate the LIBOR interest rate index.

In the dubious category is a case brought by a group of its U.S. customers who tried to collect damages from the bank after it had revealed their secret accounts and they had to pay hefty penalties to avoid tax evasion charges for unreported income. A U.S. appellate court in Chicago recently upheld a lower court’s dismissal with a ruling that was, in more than one sense, dismissive. U.S. Circuit Court Judge Richard Posner wrote that UBS “has no duty to treat [the plaintiffs] like children or illiterates, and thus remind them that they have to pay taxes on the income on their deposits.” Posner went on to state: “This lawsuit, including the appeal, is a travesty. We are surprised that UBS hasn’t asked for the imposition of sanctions on the plaintiffs and class counsel.”

This is not to say that UBS was blameless. The lawsuit came after a former UBS banker turned whistleblower had revealed how the bank actively assisted wealthy Americans seeking to hide income from the IRS. Federal prosecutors targeted UBS, which in 2009 had to pay $780 million and sign a deferred prosecution agreement to settle criminal charges of having defrauded U.S. tax authorities.

The feds then pressured UBS to hand over account information on more than 50,000 U.S. customers. UBS and the Swiss government, seeking to retain the country’s tradition of bank secrecy, resisted but in the end agreed to spill the beans on a smaller group of depositors. Using that information, the IRS went after a bunch of those tax dodgers, some of whom then foolishly thought they could use the courts to get UBS to cover their tax bills.

UBS recently prevailed in another lawsuit filed in response to a different instance of its misconduct. In 2004 the U.S. Federal Reserve fined the bank $100 million for violating U.S. trade sanctions by engaging in currency transactions with parties in countries such as Iran and Libya. Based on that, a group of Americans who had been injured in Hamas and Hezbollah attacks while in Israel sued UBS in 2008 under the Anti-Terrorism Act, arguing that the bank was liable for damages in light of its dealings with Iran, which is said to back those groups. The U.S. appeals court in New York has just upheld a dismissal of the case, though it ruled that the trial judge was wrong in holding that the victims lacked standing to bring the action in the first place.

UBS’s success in these two cases pales in comparison to the damage that its reputation has suffered both from the larger matters that prompted them and from a series of other scandals that have embroiled the company through most of the 15 years since it was created from the merger of two of Switzerland’s three big banks: Swiss Bank Corporation and Union Bank of Switzerland.

After the deal was completed, UBS’s chief executive at the time, Marcel Ospel, set out on an ambitious mission to make the company the world leader in investment banking. It was an ill-fated quest.

When UBS sought to increase its U.S. presence with the acquisition of brokerage house PaineWebber, it inherited a slew of legal problems relating both to PaineWebber’s own deceptive practices in the sale of limited partnerships and those the U.S. firm in turn took on when it bought Kidder Peabody, including a scandal in which a trader fabricated $350 million in trading profits to hide what were actually huge losses.

UBS’s U.S. operation was later caught up in the controversy over conflicts of interest between research and investment banking (UBS paid $80 million as its share of the settlement) and was sued by several U.S. state governments relating to its sale of auction-rate securities. UBS settled the actions by agreeing to pay a total of $150 million in penalties to the states and buy back more than $18 billion of the securities.

After getting bailed out to the tune of some $65 billion by the Swiss government during the financial meltdown in 2008, UBS had to pay $160 million to settle federal and state charges relating to bid-rigging in the municipal securities market. Just after that, UBS was sued by the Federal Housing Finance Agency in an action seeking to recover more than $900 million in losses suffered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from mortgage-backed securities purchased through UBS. (The case is pending.)

UBS faced criticism in 2011 after it came to light that a young trader named Kweku Adoboli working in the bank’s London offices had racked up more than $2 billion in losses. Adoboli was later found guilty of fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison, while UBS was fined £29 million by British regulators for supervisory failures.

And late last year, there was the resolution of the LIBOR manipulation case. In addition to the $1.5 billion in penalties, a Japanese subsidiary of UBS pleaded guilty to a charge of felony wire fraud in U.S. federal court. (By having a foreign subsidiary take the fall, UBS shielded its U.S. operations.) The repercussions of the LIBOR case did not disappear. During a subsequent hearing on the matter in the British Parliament, several former UBS executives were accused of “gross negligence and incompetence.” So much for the dream of financial glory.

Note: This piece draws from my new Corporate Rap Sheet on UBS, which can be found here.