The last year saw a number of large-scale white collar crime prosecutions around the nation. For example, criminal cases centered on a rogue trader’s risky loss of $2.3 billion while a number of medical companies ran into trouble for corruption and bribery. As professor Peter Henning wrote in the New York Times, the development of a major white-collar crime case in 2013 is simply “a question of when.”
Observers like Peter Henning expect aggressive prosecutions to occur in four areas of white collar crime: more cases dealing with LIBOR manipulation, corporate corruption, insider trading, and rogue traders. This will be the first of two posts that look at these areas in a little more detail.
The LIBOR manipulation scandal first hit the news in 2011 but the full criminal implications have yet to appear. One reason for the slow movement on these cases is that the scandal is by far the largest incident like it in history. Since the LIBOR rate affects almost all aspects of finance, fraudulent manipulation caused ripples throughout global markets.
In 2012, a British bank settled the first LIBOR case in London. This year, watch for the United States Department of Justice to jump into the fray by prosecuting some of the banks and individual managers involved.
Check back over the weekend for more on white collar crime predictions for 2013.
Source: The New York Times, “Looking Ahead to Civil and Criminal Cases to Come,” Peter J. Henning, Dec. 31, 2012