{"id":186282,"date":"2014-03-10T20:18:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-11T01:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/10\/going-after-induhviduals-be-still-my-beating-heart\/"},"modified":"2014-03-10T20:18:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-11T01:18:00","slug":"going-after-induhviduals-be-still-my-beating-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/03\/10\/going-after-induhviduals-be-still-my-beating-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Going after Induhviduals?* Be Still My Beating Heart!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Lawskey, head of New York’s Department of Financial Services is now saying that he will be looking at criminal filings against individuals<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Benjamin Lawsky, New York\u2019s aggressive banking regulator who is campaigning to clean up Wall Street, is turning his sights on the individuals as well as the institutions who squeeze struggling homeowners or help banks violate US sanctions.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cCorporations are a legal fiction. You have to deter bad individual conduct within corporations,\u201d said Mr Lawsky, superintendent of New York\u2019s Department of Financial Services, in an interview with the Financial Times. \u201cPeople who did the conduct are going to be held accountable.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span>Mr Lawsky\u2019s name-and-shame strategy taps into a wave of popular discontent in the US and Europe over the fact that few individual bankers have been personally sanctioned for the bad decisions that led to the global financial crisis. Taxpayers have been forced to stump up hundreds of billions of dollars to rescue banks brought low by reckless behaviour.<\/span>

<\/span>Mr Lawsky, who has ruffled the feathers of other US regulators by jumping ahead of them to accuse Standard Chartered of breaking sanctions on Iran, has already begun to take a tougher approach to individual behaviour.<\/span>

<\/span>As part of Royal Bank of Scotland\u2019s settlement in December over sanctions violations, the bank was asked to let go of four RBS employees, including the head of Asia, the Middle East and Africa in the global banking unit, and claw back the bonuses of eight other employees. Mr Lawsky\u2019s office is now investigating the rapid growth of non-bank mortgage servicing companies Ocwen and Nationstar. He is also looking into possible sanctions violations by several banks and the consultants that advise them. He recently requested information from a dozen banks over potential currency manipulation.<\/span>

<\/span>As the DFS does not have criminal authority all actions against individuals will have to be pursued through civil remedies such as fines.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cWe think about it most in the area where there has been some sort of intentional misconduct as opposed to a systemic industry wide problem,\u201d Mr Lawsky said. In addition to suspensions, industry bans and clawbacks, Mr Lawsky said he is also considering laying out the allegations in more detail to expose bad actors, which he hopes will deter people from getting into trouble.<\/span>

<\/span>The Department of Justice and other regulators have been criticised for not bringing charges against individuals and instead extracting large fines from banks to resolve allegations of misconduct. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s hoping that this will eventually result in senior people (and I don’t just mean the usual non-white suspects like Raj Rajaratnam) ending up behind bars.<\/p>\n

When former Senator and Goldman “Vampire Squid” Sachs CEO Jon Corzine and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin are sentenced to a few years in the hoosegow, I’ll throw a f%$#ing party.<\/p>\n

*<\/sup>It’s the DNRC<\/a>, man.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Lawskey, head of New York’s Department of Financial Services is now saying that he will be looking at criminal filings against individuals: Benjamin Lawsky, New York\u2019s aggressive banking regulator who is campaigning to clean up Wall Street, is turning his sights on the individuals as well as the institutions who squeeze struggling homeowners or …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1004,972,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-justice","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186282\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}