Targeting Polluters in the Courts

When it comes to dealing with egregious corporate polluters, we tend to think first about what the EPA and the Justice Department are doing to address the problem. Yet there is another way in which environmental miscreants can be called to account: private litigation.

For the past half century, a series of major lawsuits have served as the means by which large corporations have been compelled to change many of their worst environmental practices and compensate victims of those abuses.

Some of these cases have become legendary and have inspired Hollywood movies. The 2000 film Erin Brockovich told the story of a legal clerk who was central to a successful lawsuit against the utility Pacific Gas & Electric for contaminating the water supply of a California town with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium. The 2019 movie Dark Waters dramatized the efforts of attorney Robert Bilott to get DuPont to take responsibility for exposing residents of a West Virginia community to highly toxic chemicals called PFOAs.

The latest expansion of Violation Tracker includes entries on the PG&E and DuPont cases as well as 100 other lawsuits resolved over the past two decades. As a result of these actions, dozens of major corporations have paid out a total of more than $15 billion in settlements around the country.

These are all group actions in which multiple plaintiffs sued the companies for widespread harm. Initially, major environmental lawsuits were brought as class actions. In the 1990s the U.S. Supreme Court put significant restrictions on such lawsuits, but trial lawyers have been able to achieve substantial settlements through the system of multi-district litigation in which cases from various jurisdictions are transferred to a single federal court with the aim of reaching a global settlement. MDLs are even more common in product liability cases (which Violation Tracker will tackle next).

Among the 104 environmental cases just added to the database, there are class actions and MDLs as well as suits brought by environmental organizations on behalf of communities.

Topping the list of settlement amounts are the cases brought in connection with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. BP agreed to a $7 billion in 2012 settlement, which was separate from the more than $20 billion it later paid out to federal and state governments. Halliburton, also implicated in the disaster, paid a $1 billion private settlement. The other giant case was the $1.6 billion settlement Volkswagen reached with its dealerships affected by the automaker’s emissions cheating scandal. Like BP, VW also paid billions more in government settlements.

The company with the next highest total is Exxon Mobil, which has paid out more than $590 million in six different private environmental actions. Most of this amount came from a long-running lawsuit stemming from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska. The company was originally hit with a $5 billion punitive damages award, but it appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 2008 slashed the amount to $507 million.

Four of Exxon’s other cases involved the gasoline additive MTBE. Communities and governments in various parts of the country have sued numerous oil companies to hold them responsible for MTBE contamination of water supplies from leaking underground oil tanks.

Another issue involving multiple companies is that of the PFOAs mentioned above in connection with DuPont. A variety of corporations have been sued for contaminating water supplies with these hazardous substances, also known as PFAs or forever chemicals because they do not break down in the body or the environment. DuPont and its spinoffs Chemours and Corteva have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in these cases, while firms such as 3M and Georgia-Pacific have paid smaller amounts. Other suits are pending.

The dozens of other environmental cases have involved a wide range of toxic substances such as PCBs, dioxin, arsenic, TCE and vinyl chloride. The average of the 104 settlements is $150 million. Sixteen corporations have settlement totals above $100 million.

Missing from the list are major cases involving the role of corporations in exacerbating the climate crisis. Various suits have been brought, often by state and local governments and framed as shareholder actions, but so far none have resulted in significant monetary settlements. That is likely to change as the crisis grows worse and corporations are held culpable. When that happens, Violation Tracker will document the results.

Note: I would like to thank Suzanne Katzenstein and a group of her students at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, who helped identify some of the environmental lawsuits discussed above.

States vs. Big Business

Twenty twenty-one is turning out to be a banner year for state government prosecution of corporate crime and misconduct. The biggest events are, of course, the settlements with pharmaceutical companies Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson along with the three big drug distributors—Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen and McKesson—for their role in creating and prolonging the opioid epidemic.

While some argue that the amounts are not sufficient, those cases will result in billions of dollars in payments to state governments from the corporations and the family, the Sacklers, who controlled the now bankrupt Purdue and grew enormously wealthy from its operations.

In all, the states will rack up more than $30 billion in 2021, which would be the largest amount since 2008, when the states received about $53 billion in payments, largely as the result of a series of billion-dollar-plus settlements with the likes of Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to resolve allegations that the Wall Street banks misled investors in the marketing of auction-rate securities.

This year’s total is not entirely the result of the opioid litigation. There have also been numerous other cases resolved by state attorneys general that may not involve billions but are still quite significant. Here are some examples.

In July, the New York AG announced that TIAA-CREF, a subsidiary of retirement-services giant TIAA, had agreed to pay $97 million to resolve allegations that it fraudulently misled tens of thousands of customers into moving their retirement investments into higher-fee accounts offered by the company.

Also in July, the Oregon AG announced that L Brands, the owner of Victoria’s Secret and other retail chains, had agreed to commit $90 million of company funds to protect employees from sexual harassment and discrimination and require accountability from executives when misconduct occurs. The settlement came in the wake of allegations by the Oregon Public Employees Retirement Fund and other shareholders that the company’s board of directors failed to investigate former CEO and Chairman Emeritus Leslie Wexner’s close personal ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and ignored a widespread and pervasive culture of sexual harassment at the company.

In June, the Ohio AG announced that Centene Corp. agreed to pay $88 million to resolve allegations of overcharging Medicaid by charging more than the capped industry-standard prices for drugs while acting as a pharmacy benefit manager. Centene paid $55 million to settle a similar case with the state of Mississippi, while Bristol Myers Squibb paid $75 million in an overcharging settlement with a group of states.

Also in June, the North Carolina AG announced that JUUL Labs would pay $40 million and change its practices to resolve allegations that it was responsible for misleading teenagers into becoming addicted to nicotine-based vaping products.  

Last month, the Pennsylvania AG announced that Glenn O. Hawbaker, Inc. would pay more than $20 million to resolve criminal charges that it misdirected retirement contributions meant specifically for employees working on prevailing-wage projects into a company-wide plan that covered executives and owners of the firm.

Also in August, the Georgia AG announced that Turtle Creek Assets, Ltd would pay more than $19 million to resolve allegations that the company committed multiple violations of the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Georgia Fair Business Practices Act.

What this sampling of cases shows is that amid all the controversy over their policies on issues such as voting rights and abortion, many states of varying ideological orientation continue to carry out their responsibility to protect citizens from irresponsible corporate behavior.

Note: These cases will appear in an update of Violation Tracker that will be posted later this month.

Is Big Business an Agent of Social Change?

In the wake of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020, Corporate America pledged to spend billions of dollars to address systemic racism. A new analysis by the Washington Post raises questions both about those commitments and the entire idea of relying on big business to address social problems.

Surveying the 50 U.S. largest companies (based on stock market valuation), the Post found that 44 of them pledged a total of $4.2 billion in donations and committed another $45.2 billion in loans, investments and other initiatives. More than one year later, the companies reported disbursing only $1.7 billion.

The slow movement of the funds should not be taken as an indication that the commitments were a burden on the firms. As the Post points out, the $4 billion cash portion represented less than one percent of the aggregate annual profits of the 50 companies.

Much of the $45 billion in other commitments, 90 percent of which came from Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, represented loans and investments on which the companies would make a profit. Moreover, providing home mortgages and other financial services in Black and Latino neighborhoods is something the banks were already supposed to be doing under federal laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act.

All this goes to show that the companies were not sacrificing very much in their racial justice commitments. Yet many of them have still dawdled in writing the checks. For example, the Post notes that Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco Systems, tweeted in June 2020 that his company would be contributing $5 million to a handful of groups such as Black Lives Matter. The newspaper found that Black Lives Matter has not yet received any money.

It remains unclear whether Cisco and the other companies ever intend to make good on their pledges, even though they have already reaped the public relations benefits from the commitments.

Apart from the matter of reliability is the question of whether it makes sense to call on large corporations to help deal with matters such as systemic racism. Typically, this is framed as a debate between those who see big business as a potential force for positive change and those who argue that corporations should focus solely on creating value for shareholders.

There are problems with both those positions. The notion that the business of business is solely to generate profits, long popularized by the rightwing economist Milton Friedman, is not only amoral but simplistic. Corporations may find it beneficial to spend money on things such as charitable contributions or lobbying even if the immediate effect is to reduce profits a bit. Those expenses may very well lead to higher profits in the longer term by generating good will or changing public policy.

Some corporations, in fact, may seek to project an image of social or environmental responsibility as part of their brand—think Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, etc. When they make contributions to progressive causes, they are really engaged in nothing more than marketing.

Yet perhaps the biggest misconception in most discussions of the role of corporations is the assumption that big business is somehow part of the antidote to social and environmental ills. The truth is often that companies are a cause of those ills.

For example, when it comes to systemic racism, large corporations are hardly innocent bystanders. Many of them have decades-long track records of racial discrimination in the treatment of both employees and customers.

Many of these cases are documented in Violation Tracker. The database contains more than 3,000 entries on employment discrimination (of all kinds) with total penalties of more than $4 billion. These include actions by agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as well as class action lawsuits. Among the latter are multi-million-dollar settlements paid by major companies such as Coca-Cola, Federal Express, and Eastman Kodak.

Violation Tracker also has more than 200 cases in which companies were accused of bias in their dealings with customers—such as charging African-American borrowers higher interest rates than their white counterparts. These cases have resulted in more than $1 billion in fines and settlements. Among the companies involved in these matters have been MetLife, JPMorgan Chase, and Toyota.

All of this is to say that many corporations have much work to do to eliminate systemic racism under their own roof before being called on to help address the problem at a national level. When it comes to social change, big business often remains part of the problem rather than the solution.

Targeting Gunmakers in the Courts

Among the scores of industries covered in Violation Tracker, one of the most under-represented is the business of producing firearms. That’s not because gunmakers are particularly virtuous, but rather because there are few laws and regulations for them to violate.

Federal oversight of the industry is pretty much non-existent. The few penalties that have been imposed on companies such as Remington, Beretta, Colt’s Manufacturing, Smith & Wesson, and Sturm, Ruger have had nothing to do with their specific activity. Instead, they have been imposed by agencies such as OSHA that oversee companies of all kinds. The penalty total for each of these firms is no more than a few hundred thousand dollars—a trivial amount for an industry whose products do so much harm.

The other arena in which the industry has enjoyed near impunity is the court system. That’s largely due to the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prevents dealers and manufacturers from liability when guns are used in shootings and other criminal activities.

Ironically, gun companies are still considered liable when their products are defective. For example, in 2016 the Brazilian gunmaker Forjas Taurus agreed to pay $239 million to settle a class action brought in federal court in Florida. The plaintiffs had alleged that its guns fired unintentionally when dropped.

Various attempts have been made to get around the industry’s liability shield. A lawsuit brought against Remington by the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut was able to proceed by using the state unfair trade practices law. The case still dragged on for years, though it was recently reported that Remington is offering to settle the matter for $33 million. That’s not much, but it could serve as a stepping stone to more appropriate damages in other cases.

Another novel approach is being taken in a lawsuit recently filed in federal court in Massachusetts by the government of Mexico against ten U.S. gunmakers. The suit accuses the companies of facilitating the flow of weapons to the drug cartels causing so much havoc in Mexico. It argues that the federal liability shield does not apply, since the harm took place in another country.

The lawsuit is considered a long shot, but if nothing else the case may expose more details about the questionable practices of the industry. The complaint has already highlighted the brazen practice by one gunmaker of engraving the image of Emilio Zapata on one of its models to appeal to Mexican buyers. One of those pistols was used to kill a Mexican investigative reporter.

There are signs that the real purpose of the lawsuit is to pressure the U.S. government to put restrictions on the firearms trade. The suit seeks to do this by equating cross-border gun trafficking from the U.S. to the drug trafficking from Mexico that American officials frequently decry. Significant change is not likely to happen any time soon, but meanwhile any challenge to the gun’s industry’s impunity is welcome.

Corporate Contamination

The infrastructure bill making its way through the Senate is said to include $55 billion for water systems, including funding to replace lead pipes throughout the country. That will be a relief for many localities, but other communities face water problems caused not by aging pipes but by corporate negligence.

One example is the town of Hoosick Falls in upstate New York, which discovered in 2014 that its water supply had been contaminated by perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a toxic chemical linked to a range of ailments, including cancer. PFOA is one of a group of substances known as PFAS, also called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the body or in the environment.

The source of the contamination in Hoosick Falls was a plastics plant that produced electronic components treated with PFOA, which was originally developed by DuPont for its Teflon non-stick coating for cookware. DuPont has been embroiled in a long-running dispute over the impact of PFOA on residents living near the plant in West Virginia where it produced the dangerous chemical.

It is now in a similar controversy with regard to Hoosick Falls, together with the French company Saint-Gobain, which purchased the plant in 1999, and other companies that operated it before that. Residents filed a class action lawsuit against the companies and recently reached a tentative $65 million settlement with most of the defendants.

DuPont is not part of that deal and is challenging it in court, claiming that it will hinder its ability to get a fair deal in its ongoing negotiations with the plaintiffs. A federal judge just rebuffed the company and gave preliminary approval to the settlement.

It is difficult to feel any sympathy for DuPont, whose response to the PFOA problem over the years has left a lot to be desired. As dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters, it took a crusading lawyer named Robert Bilott to break through the attempt by the company and its outside attorneys to cover up the pattern of cancers and birth defects experienced by residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia exposed to PFOA.

Yet DuPont is not the only corporation responsible for causing harm to water quality. For example, poultry producer Mountaire Farms recently agreed to pay a total of $205 million to settle a class action lawsuit and a case brought by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control in connection with groundwater contamination caused by its processing plants.

I am now in the process of documenting these and dozens of other major environmental lawsuits—also known as toxic torts—for the next expansion of Violation Tracker scheduled for September. These cases, pushed by community activists as well as lawyers, are a reminder that the civil justice system is often a necessary supplement to government regulatory action in addressing corporate misconduct.

More Competition Is Only Part of the Solution

The executive order on competition issued by the Biden Administration earlier this month gave rise to headlines suggesting it was a direct assault on corporate power. The New York Times said the administration was stepping up its “mission to rein big business in.” The Wall Street Journal said the order “targets big business.”

There is no doubt that the order lays out an ambitious agenda to address anti-competitive practices in numerous areas of the economy. Coupled with the nomination of aggressive advocates to head the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, it creates momentum in dealing with the increasing dominance of large corporations over major portions of the economy.

Yet there are risks in relying too much on the idea of competition as the way to deal with all the harmful effects of modern capitalism. There are some areas in which we need less rather than more competition. After all, for example, the basic mission of the labor movement is to take wages out of competition.

Moreover, unions have traditionally had more organizing success among larger companies than smaller ones. Union density is higher at utilities, which are often monopolies, than any other industry. Utility workers are also better paid than most other blue-collar workers.

This is not, of course, true across the board. Giant corporations such as Walmart and Amazon have adamantly resisted unions and have thus been able to suppress wages. Some smaller firms have learned to live with unions.

There are also complications when it come to areas such as consumer protection. Some large companies use their market domination to keep prices high (example: cable TV providers), while others use theirs to drive their competitors out of business by keeping prices artificially low.

And if we look at employment and consumer issues at the same time, we’re confronted with the fact that large corporations may use the lack of competition to benefit customers at the expense of workers, or vice versa.

One thing I have learned in the course of gathering data for Violation Tracker is that corporate misconduct can be found in companies of all sizes. The database now contains more than 490,000 entries with total penalties of $669 billion. Of those cases, about one-fifth involve units and subsidiaries of large corporations. That leaves several hundred thousand smaller companies that have been implicated in abuses such as wage theft, employment discrimination, government contracting fraud, predatory lending, nursing home negligence, and toxic dumping.

The larger companies pay vastly much more in total fines and settlements, but it remains unclear whether in the aggregate they or smaller firms do more harm to workers, consumers and communities.

All of this is to say that more competition, while in many respects desirable, would not necessarily address all the ills of private enterprise. What we need are not just more players in the market, but better controls on all the players, whether they are mammoth corporations or more modest-sized operations.

Striking Back

The media these days is full of what amounts to employer propaganda. The setbacks in the organizing drives at Amazon are called signs that unions are obsolete. The difficulties that low-wage companies are having in refilling positions are presented as justification for terminating enhanced unemployment compensation. The long-overdue upward movement in wages is depicted as part of a dangerous trend toward inflation.

The Washington Post has just bucked this trend by publishing an account of a labor conflict in Kansas that reminds us that certain unpleasant realities persist in the workplace and that some old-fashioned ways of responding to them are still suitable.

Hundreds of workers at a Frito-Lay snack food plant in Topeka went on strike earlier this month to protest work schedules that sound like something out of the 19th Century. Many of the employees were being forced to work seven days a week and up to 12 hours per shift, creating workweeks that could reach 84 hours.  

The reason for this is that demand for Cheetos and Doritos has been robust, and Frito-Lay wants to make the most of it. Fortunately, the workers are represented by the Bakery union (BCTGM), so they are not completely at the mercy of management. Yet the company is said to have rebuffed calls from the union to hire more workers and is taking a hard line in contract renewal negotiations.

Frito-Lay’s retrograde management style started long before the current dispute. The company, a division of the soft drink giant PepsiCo, has a record of workplace abuses dating back at least two decades. This can be seen in Violation Tracker, which documents 29 cases since 2000.

These include seven cases in which Frito-Lay had to provide back-pay to workers to settle unfair labor practice charges as well as 13 cases in which it was penalized by OSHA for health and safety violations.

But perhaps what is most remarkable about Frito-Lay is that it has been sued repeatedly for wage and hour abuses and has paid out more than $23 million to settle five different collective action lawsuits. The largest of these was an $11.9 million settlement back in 2001 involving driver-salespersons. In 2018 the company paid $6.5 million to settle allegations that it did not provide proper pay to long-haul drivers, including a failure to comply with California law concerning meal and rest breaks.

Frito-Lay’s workplace practices are in keeping with those of its parent. PepsiCo has paid millions more to settle similar lawsuits relating to its Pepsi operations. These include a $5 million settlement in 2018 and a $3 million settlement in 2015. It has also paid fines to the U.S. Labor Department for Fair Labor Standards Act violations.

While some of the circumstances of the Kansas strike stem from the current economy, at its core is the age-old struggle by workers to be treated fairly. Let’s hope that the time-honored tactic of withholding labor is sufficient to get Frito-Lay to do the right thing.

Attacking Corporate Concentration on Multiple Fronts

Big Tech breathed a sigh of relief in late June when a federal judge dismissed antitrust complaints that had been filed against Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission and a coalition of state attorneys general.

That respite is proving short-lived. Although some of its enforcement powers were curtailed by the Supreme Court earlier this year, the FTC under its new chair Lina Khan is mapping out an aggressive approach. The commission, for example, recently voted to make greater use of techniques such as subpoenas to compel companies to provide evidence. It also voted to prioritize investigations into technology platforms and health businesses, two areas in which large corporations have too much power.

At the same time, the dismissal of the Facebook actions has given more impetus to moves in Congress to modernize and strengthen federal antitrust laws, most of which are now well over a century old. Bills are pending that would address Big Tech practices such as buying up smaller competitors and giving preference to their own services on the platforms they control.

A third front is at the state level, where attorneys general have shown no sign of being deterred by the Facebook setback. A group of 37 AGs just filed an antitrust suit against Google, alleging that it effectively forces users of Android mobile devices to purchase apps through its Play Store and collects extravagant commissions in the process.

This is just the latest in a series of antitrust actions filed against Google by the states and the U.S. Justice Department. The state actions are of particular interest because they involve AGs from across the political spectrum. Those bringing the new Google suit come not only from unsurprising states such as New York and California but also the likes of Florida, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. In fact, the lead states include Utah and Tennessee.

At a time when partisan gridlock dooms many policy initiatives in Washington, it is encouraging to see states of very different political stripes find common ground in addressing corporate abuses.

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. As my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First pointed out in a 2019 report, state AGs have banded together hundreds of times to bring multistate actions against a variety of abuses. In Violation Tracker, we document more than 600 successful cases of this type, which have resulted in penalties of over $112 billion.

These include more than 100 cases involving anti-competitive practices. Yet many of these concerned outright price-fixing, which is a serious offense but one that is often not relevant to tech companies that abuse their power in other ways.

Addressing monopoly control and other abuses related to concentration of power is supposed to be the purview of federal regulators, whose enforcement approaches have failed to keep up with changes in the economy.

We can still hope the FTC and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division will reinvigorate themselves, but for now it is good to see the states step in to address corporate concentration.

The Wolves of Wall Street

Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch are two of the oldest names on Wall Street. Morgan long focused on serving corporations with investment banking services, while Merrill was more of a retail brokerage. Both got caught up in the transformation of the financial services sector. Morgan purchased brokerage firms Dean Witter and Smith Barney, while Merrill was taken over by Bank of America during the 2008 financial crisis.

During the past dozen years, both Morgan and Merrill have seen their reputations tarnished by a series of legal controversies. When Violation Tracker began collecting data on financial offenses in 2015, BofA appeared atop the list of banks that had paid more than $1 billion in fines and settlements, thanks mainly to cases involving Merrill. Morgan ranked 7th.

The database, now with information extending back to 2000, shows BofA with total penalties of over $80 billion, far more than any other parent company.  Morgan has paid out more than $9 billion.

Morgan and Merrill also feature prominently in the newest category of data to be added to Violation Tracker: penalties imposed on securities firms by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. Unlike the other agencies whose cases are compiled in Violation Tracker, FINRA is not a government entity. It is, however, authorized by Congress to acted as an industry self-regulator and is overseen by the SEC.

By reviewing all press releases issued since 2000 by FINRA and its predecessor, the National Association of Securities Dealers, we have assembled 726 cases with total penalties of more than $1 billion. And when we matched the firms named in the cases to their corporate parents, we found that roughly half of the actions were linked to the giants of Wall Street. Those companies account for an even larger share of the penalty dollars.

Morgan Stanley and Bank of America (mostly via Merrill Lynch) are tied for first place in terms of the number of cases, with 38 each. Morgan leads in penalty dollars, with a total of $150 million, followed by BofA with $134 million. The other firms with the highest total penalties include Credit Suisse, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Deutsche Bank, and UBS. (The Morgan and BofA totals on Violation Tracker’s FINRA summary page do not match the amounts cited here because they have been adjusted avoid double-counting of some penalties linked to cases handled jointly with the SEC.)

Because the penalties imposed by FINRA are relatively low, the case numbers are perhaps more significant. What does it say about Morgan and Merrill that they have each been cited more than three dozen times for violating rules meant to protect investors? In one case, Merrill was cited for failing to prevent one of its representatives in Texas from operating a Ponzi scheme.

And what does it say about FINRA that it allows the big players to commit violations over and over again without doing more than imposing additional modest fines?  

It should be noted that the cases we collected from the FINRA press releases make up only a portion of the organization’s actions, with thousands more against firms and individuals contained in a proprietary database. In other words, the level of recidivism among the large Wall Street firms is probably even worse than what is suggested by the press releases.

Moreover, just a few days ago, after we finished processing the FINRA data, the organization imposed a new $3.25 million fine on Merrill Lynch and ordered it to pay $8.4 million in restitution to customers.

Neither government action nor industry self-regulation seems to be very effective at curbing financial misconduct.

Note: Along with the new FINRA cases, Violation Tracker has just been updated with information from the more than 300 federal, state and local agencies covered by the database. The Tracker now contains 490,000 entries with total penalties of $669 billion.

The European Banking Blacklist

The European Union has shaken up the financial world by excluding a group of large banks from participating in the marketing of bonds being floated to help in the economic recovery of member states. According to reports in various business publications, the ten banks are being singled out because of their involvement in cases in which they were accused of manipulating bond and currency markets. In other words, they are being punished for misconduct.

While these moves may not have a major bottom-line impact on the banks—which include U.S. giants JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America—the EU is sending an important message about corporate wrongdoing.

Large companies have come to assume they can essentially buy their way out of legal jeopardy by paying fines and settlements that have grown larger but are still far from seriously punitive. As Violation Tracker documents, the big banks are Exhibit A for this phenomenon.

The database shows that the financial sector overall has paid more than $300 billion in U.S. penalties over the past two decades, far and away more than any other part of the economy. Bank of America is at the top of the list of penalty payers, with a total of $82 billion. JPMorgan is second with $35 billion, and Citigroup is fourth with $25 billion.

Non-U.S. banks being singled out by the EU have also accumulated substantial U.S. penalties, apart from what they have paid elsewhere. For example, Deutsche Bank has paid out $18 billion and NatWest (formerly the Royal Bank of Scotland) $13 billion.

The EU’s move is focused on a particular set of scandals in which these banks were alleged to have colluded to rig markets. Among these are cases involving the manipulation of currency markets. In 2015, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland each paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements to resolve criminal charges brought by the U.S. Justice Department.

Unlike many other situations in which large corporations are offered deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements, the banks in this case had to plead guilty to the felony charges. Yet there was little in the way of consequences beyond the penalty payments. The banks were put on probation, on the assumption this would cause them to cease their bad behavior. Yet all the banks continued to rack up regulatory violations in subsequent years.

Reuters estimates that the blacklisted banks will lose out on about 86 million euros in syndication fees. This is a lot less than what the banks have paid in penalties. Yet, if banks begin to see that misconduct will cause them to be excluded from business opportunities, that may be more of an inducement to avoid corrupt behavior.

The dilemma for policymakers is that misconduct is so widespread in the financial sector that it is difficult to find service providers with clean hands. While excluding the ten banks, the EU turned to a group of others to handle the debt issue. Those included the likes of HSBC and BNP Paribas, which have their own substantial corporate rap sheets. Perhaps a larger blacklist is needed.