Executives face new threat when corporations do wrong: jail

[applegrove]

Executives face new threat when corporations do wrong: jail

By Schuyler Velasco at the Christian Science Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2015/1029/Executives-face-new-threat-when-corporations-do-wrong-jail

"SNIP.............


This week, what many skeptics have come to consider the unthinkable happened: A Wall Street banker faced certain legal consequences for unscrupulous trading practices.

On Tuesday, former Goldman Sachs banker Rohit Bansa agreed to plead guilty to charges of taking confidential documents from a source at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he worked as a regulator for several years prior to his stint with the investment giant. Along with his source, a former New York Fed worker, Mr. Bansa could face up to a year in prison and a permanent ban from the banking industry for using the leaked documents to gain an unfair advantage when facing clients. Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, could face up to $50 million in related fines.

Bansa’s case is remarkable, in part, because criminal prosecutions are still rare on Wall Street. But it comes as the federal government has put a new emphasis on holding individual executives accountable for their companies' actions, and as white-collar workers and executives in other corners of the corporate world are even now being held accountable for corporate wrongdoing.

The trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship marks “the first time in 150 years of Appalachian mining that the top boss of a coal firm has ever had to answer for how he ran his company,” according to Slate. That trial is set to conclude in November. And last month, the former CEO of the Peanut Corporation of America was sentenced to 28 years in prison for his role in a deadly salmonella outbreak in peanut butter – the largest ever in a food safety case in the US.

Meanwhile, a United States Department of Justice investigation into FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, is focused mainly on high-ranking officials and top aides to former president Sepp Blatter (and possibly Blatter himself) on multiple charges of corruption.



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[hobbit709]

1. Doesn't happen often enough to make any of them think about consequences.

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Yes-- these are blatant crimes. Most are a lot more difficult to prosecute.