Top Federal Prosecutor of Corporate Crime Will Resign
The latest member of the old boys club to shuffle back to the private sector, or a hard-nosed, bank-fraud bulldog giving up? The NYTimes article sheds some light on this.
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/top-federal-prosecutor-of-corporate-crime-will-resign/
Lanny A. Breuer, the federal prosecutor who led the Justice Department’s response to corporate crime in the wake of the financial crisis, will announce on Wednesday that he is stepping down after nearly four years in the post. As head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, one of the most senior roles at the agency, Mr. Breuer tackled corporate bribery and public corruption. But it was his focus on Wall Street that received the most attention, from supporters and critics alike.
While he has come under fire for a dearth of prosecutions on Wall Street in response to the crisis, Mr. Breuer also oversaw an aggressive crackdown on money-laundering and interest-rate manipulation at some of the world’s biggest banks. In two weekslast month, he joined a nearly $2 billion case against HSBC for money-laundering and a $1.5 billion settlement with UBS for rate-rigging. Next week, he is expected to take a similar rate-rigging action against the Royal Bank of Scotland. “I think the criminal division is a fundamentally different place than it was four years ago,” Mr. Breuer said in an interview. “It’s the highlight of my professional career.”
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By virtue of his perch at the Justice Department in Washington, Mr. Breuer became the face of Wall Street prosecutions in the aftermath of the financial crisis. But when few such cases materialized, critics like the Occupy Wall Street protesters turned on him, portraying him as an apologist for banks at the center of the mortgage mess. In contrast, he drew praise for the sweeping crackdown on rate-rigging in the banking industry, which has largely involved international benchmark rates.
In a rate manipulation case last month, Mr. Breuer’s team secured a major payout from UBS and a guilty plea from the bank’s Japanese unit, making UBS the first big global bank in more than two decades to have a subsidiary plead guilty to fraud. Mr. Breuer, who announced the action after rejecting a last-minute plea from the bank’s chairman, also filed criminal charges against two former employees at the bank. The deal sent a strong signal that the authorities wanted to hold banks responsible for their wrongdoing.
Alright, what's a "white shoe" law firm? Time for google.
= new reply since forum marked as read
