Convicted Corporations Aren’t Really Bad Boys

June 3, 2015  |  New York Law Journal

In this article, we discuss the recent guilty pleas by four major international banks—Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, and Royal Bank of Scotland—for the attempted manipulation of foreign exchange rates. Although the Department of Justice characterized the pleas as “historic resolutions,” in truth the government made significant efforts to blunt the effects of the criminal convictions by granting waivers to rules that would have restricted the banks’ ability to continue doing business in the United States—so-called “bad boy” provisions. We also discuss how these resolutions illustrate fundamental problems with the current framework for corporate criminal liability in the United States.

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