No Banker Crimes? Don’t Make Me Laugh!

“There Were No Convictions of Bankers for Good Reason” is the headline of a post by Mark F. Pomerantz, a lawyer and retired partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in the New York Times’s Room for Debate discussion:

The reason that senior bankers did not face charges, even though investigators interviewed countless witnesses and pored over truckloads of emails and other documents for many years, is that the executives running companies like Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan were not engaged in criminal acts.

At least that is why according to Pomerantz. It should surprise no one that a lawyer who spent much of his career representing financial institutions and their executives wouldn’t see any prosecutable crimes. Fortunately, it is easily refutable, which is our task for today and tomorrow.

Pomerantz’s claim is, along with other like it, what we should expect from corporate management and its hired apologists. But this exercise in cynical spin also does significant damage to respect for the rule of law and undermines respect for legal institutions and the legitimacy of elected officials.

I have been following the absence of legal prosecutions since 2008, and have posted on that subject more than 500 times. But this isn’t the obsession of one lone crank (i.e., me). Many others in banking, law enforcement and government who aren’t on the payroll of banks have reviewed the events of the financial crisis and have reached the same conclusion — that the law was broken repeatedly by bankers.

Continues here

 

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