Along with paying $2.6 billion to settle criminal and civil
charges for having “failed, and failed miserably” to notify the SEC of warning signs that could have
short-circuited Bernie Madoff’s $17 billion Ponzi operation, J.P. Morgan Chase only had
to acknowledge that its actions were improper.[1] No criminal prosecution ensued. The electronic evidence against Madoff's operation was too damning for JP Morgan Chase to have missed it.
Indeed, according to USA Today, “JPMorgan had
suspicions about Madoff’s operation as early as December 1998, when a bank fund
manager warned the investment returns were ‘possibly too good to be true.’”[2]
Without submitting any “suspicious activity reports” to the U.S. Government as
required by law, the bank had pulled $275 million of its own “feeder funds” from
Madoff’s fund two months before Madoff’s
financial services firm collapsed.[3]
In other words, the bankers connected the dots well enough for the bank's financial interest and
perhaps even their own, yet strangely enough no one at the bank could manage to let the
outside world know, even though federal law mandated reporting the suspicions to the SEC. and responsibility urged it.
The full essay is at "Bankers or the Bank: Which is responsible?"
The full essay is at "Bankers or the Bank: Which is responsible?"
J.P. Morgan hitting a man. Was he demonstrating that criminal law applies to human beings rather than to organizations themselves? Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
1. This was according to Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.Tim Mullaney and Kevin McCoy, “JPMorgan to Pay $2.6 billion in Madoff Case
Settlements,” USA Today, January 8,
2014.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
