Thursday, April 04, 2013

The words they dare not use - fraud and corruption

Goldman Sachs trader Matthew Marshall Taylor has pleaded guilty to “defrauding” the bank with an $8.3bn (£5.5bn) unauthorised trade in 2007 that went awry. Taylor told the court his actions were to boost his reputation and pay packet. His salary was $150,000 and he expected a $1.6m bonus.

A report by Barclays bank has blamed "cultural shortcomings" at the bank for problems that led to the Libor interest rate rigging scandal last year. The review said the bank had become too focused on profit and bonuses rather than the interests of customers. There was a sense that senior management did not want to hear bad news.

And is it just the banks guilty of corruption?

The energy company,SSE, was fined £10.5m for mis-selling - lying to customers about their tariffs and special deals. 23,000 hard pressed members of the working class who are in increasing numbers falling into fuel poverty were duped into switching to a more expensive SSE tariff. "The people employed to do the main auditing of doorstep sales received a commission on sales and therefore had a financial interest in not reporting misbehaviour".

That “record" fine is 0.5% of the cash generated year-in and year-out by SSE which last reported a profit of £397.5m. For a company of SSE's size and stability, it is a financial gnat bite. Nor will the cheated customers automatically get their money back. They will need to make time-consuming individual complaints of being mis-sold. And yet again, no criminal charges against any of the company executives. Its chief executive in 2012 received £1,187,000 and its share-holders still receiving generous dividends.

Hustlers. Cheats. Crooks. Fraudsters. Business has always had them, and sometimes they’ve been punished. But today, those who cheat and put the rest of us at risk are often getting off scot-free.  The problem is that financial crimes, unlike crimes of passion and crimes of opportunity, come with their alibis already built in. You build a veneer of legitimacy about what you’re doing. You get accountants to sign off on what you’ve done. You practice this legal concept called “willful blindness,” and that is, in some cases senior executives are cut out intentionally from controversial things because they don’t want to be able to say, well, I approved that or I saw that. Someone below them is compensated quite handsomely for taking the fall, if you will.

Being caught is just the cost of doing business. Capitalism is not just one bad apple, but a rotten tree and a diseased orchard.




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