EXAMPLES OF CORRUPT CORPORATE BEHAVIOR Part 3

Here are three recent examples of corrupt corporate behavior in the financial industry, where corruption is persistent and seems to know no bounds. The exposure of corruption and its triggering of the 2008 financial crash doesn’t seem to have changed anything. It seems that every week there’s another report of serious corruption in the financial industry. Here are three examples that show the depth and breadth of that corruption: one of long-term systemic corruption at a major bank, one of a specific example of corruption from a different major bank, and one from a small, relatively new member of the industry. (This previous post highlighted three other examples of corporate corruption, two from the pharmaceutical industry and one from the financial industry.)

Example #1: Deutsche Bank has fallen from the second largest bank in the world in 2008 to the 21^st largest in 2020 due to a wide range of corrupt behavior that finally caught up with it. It postponed its financial collapse and shrinkage by overvaluing its assets, among other fraudulent accounting strategies. Its history of corruption is meticulously detailed in the book, Dark Towers. [1] In 2018, its long-time involvement in tax evasion and money laundering for wealthy individuals resulted in police raiding its Frankfurt, Germany, headquarters. This wasn’t the first time this had happened. In 2012, hundreds of government police had raided its office to gather evidence in a different tax evasion scheme that involved permits for carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 2012, Deutsche Bank has paid over $15 billion in settlements for illegal activities. As-of 2016, it was involved in over 7,000 legal cases and had set aside over $5 billion for the potential impact of those cases. It was a major contributor to the 2008 financial crash, which led to its payment in 2017 of over $7 billion in settlements for fraud in its sales of mortgage-backed securities. In 2015, it agreed to pay a fine of $2.5 billion for manipulating international interest rates, pleading guilty to fraud and agreeing to fire 29 employees who had been involved. (Not a single individual was charged with a crime, however.) In 2017, it was fined over $600 million for money laundering that moved over $10 billion of suspicious money out of Russia. In 2018, it agreed to pay $75 million to settle charges of improperly handling U.S. transactions involving foreign securities.

Deutsche Bank is or has been investigated for numerous other corrupt behaviors including manipulating foreign currency exchange rates and violating international sanctions by engaging in over $10 billion of illegal financial transaction with Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and other sanctioned countries. Some of these transactions involved funding for terrorism and drug trafficking. It is under investigation for participating in a criminal cartel in Australia, $150 billion of money laundering with a Danish bank, and a multi-billion fraud scheme with a Malaysian development fund. And by the way, it has engaged in illegal spying on its critics. Its corruption goes back at least to the 1930s when it cooperated with the Nazis and funded their activities, which it tried to hide for many years thereafter.

Example #2: Goldman Sachs, the fifth largest U.S. bank, has agreed to pay $3 billion to regulators in multiple countries for a massive bribery scheme that stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the Malaysian government. Goldman Sachs took in $593 million in unusually large fees for its role in the underlying transactions. Although two of its executives have been indicted (a partner and a managing director) and its Malaysian subsidiary has pleaded guilty to bribery, many have criticized the settlement as not being a meaningful punishment both because of the scale of the criminal activity and the dollar amount of the settlement, which is less than 3 months of profits. Furthermore, Goldman Sachs has only partially cooperated with the investigation, delayed providing crucial information, and failed to self-report illegal activity that it knew about and is required by law to report. [2] By the way, this will bring the fines it has paid out since 1998 to over $10 billion. [3]

Example #3: Robinhood Financial LLC, a 2015 start-up that provides a smart phone app for buying and selling stocks, has agreed to pay a $65 million penalty to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading customers and costing them an estimated $34 million. Robinhood advertised no commission trades, however, it generated revenue by executing customers’ trades through companies that paid it fees for the trades. It failed to disclose this to its customers. It had an incentive to select companies that paid it the most for those trades even if customers got worse prices on the stocks they were buying. Nonetheless, Robinhood claimed the quality of its execution of its customers’ trades was as good or better than its rivals. [4] In addition to this federal settlement, Massachusetts regulators are pursuing a complaint against Robinhood for violating state securities laws by not providing accurate information to customers. The complaint also states Robinhood’s website has had several outages that have prevented customers from trading during important periods when stock prices were shifting significantly. [5]

To put financial industry corruption in a larger perspective, often federal cases of financial misbehavior, as in the Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs cases above, result in the financial corporations signing a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA). This requires the corporation to pay a fine and agree to a period of probation (during which it promises not to repeat its bad behavior), but usually the corporation and its executives avoid criminal prosecution. However, there are multiple examples of money laundering cases against big banks where the corporations had already signed DPAs in previous money laundering cases, repeated their bad behavior, and received the same lenient treatment all over again. As a result, the big financial corporations appear to view fines for corrupt behavior as a routine cost of doing business. [6]

The persistence of corruption in the financial industry makes clear the need for stronger steps to deter future illegal behavior. Stronger government regulation and significant financial and criminal punishments for the corporations (e.g., truly significant fines and, ultimately, revocation of their corporate charters, putting them out of business) and for their executives (e.g., jail time and personal fines) are needed. The industry and its supporters among our elected officials have fought back hard and largely successfully against efforts to strengthen regulation and consumer protection in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, so not only is there much work to do but, in addition, it will be a tough fight.

[1]      Enrich, D., 2020, “Dark Towers,” HarperCollins Publishers, NY, NY.

[2]      Woodman, S., 11/2/20, “Goldman Sachs 1MDB settlement: a meaningful punishment for major financial crimes?” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (https://www.icij.org/inside-icij/2020/11/goldman-sachs-1mdb-settlement-a-meaningful-punishment-for-major-financial-crimes/)

[3]      Collins, C., 11/30/20, “Petulant plutocrat of the week,” Inequality.org weekly blog post from the Institute for Policy Studies (https://inequality.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/inequality-newsletter-november-30-2020.html)

[4]      Michaels, D., & Osipovich, A., 12/17/20, “Robinhood Financial to pay $65 million to settle SEC probe,” The Wall Street Journal

[5]      Denham, H., 12/18/20, “Robinhood agrees to $65m penalty to resolve SEC charges,” The Boston Globe from the Washington Post

[6]      Woodman, S., 11/2/20, see above