DoJ says it will consider jailing executives who order corporate crimes
The doctrine under former AG Eric Holder (documented in Matt Taibbi’s brilliant The Divid) was to allow executives to pay fines that were less than the profits from their crimes.
Holder said that he was protecting the innocent employees, suppliers, customers and shareholders of these criminal enterprises by allowing companies to continue operating and financing the US government by taxing some of the wealth generated by their crimes. Curiously, he never used his prosecutorial power to bargain for the breakup of too-big-to-jail enterprises into smaller ones whose C-suite could be led out of their offices in handcuffs without creating systemic risk.
Eric Holder is back in private practice today at Covington & Burling, the corporate law-firm whose clients avoided prison thanks to his strategy of using fines instead of jail for high-ranking corporate criminals.
September 10th, 2015 9:03pm