Excerpted from U.S. Securities and Exchange commissioner Kara M. Stein’s dissenting statement regarding waivers granted by the commission for banks pleading guilty to criminal charges involving manipulation of foreign exchange rates (May 21, 2015):
“I dissent from the Commission’s Orders, issued on May 20, 2015, that granted … waivers from an array of disqualifications required by federal securities regulations… Allowing these institutions to continue business as usual, after multiple and serious regulatory and criminal violations, poses risks to investors and the American public that are being ignored. It is not sufficient to look at each waiver request in a vacuum…
And today the Commission heads further down this path. After the guilty pleas, UBS was granted a waiver that was explicitly conditioned on compliance with the judgment in the LIBOR-related matter. That explicit condition has now been violated. Yet, the Commission has just issued UBS a new waiver.
It is troubling enough to consistently grant waivers for criminal misconduct. It is an order of magnitude more troubling to refuse to enforce our own explicit requirements for such waivers.
This type of recidivism and repeated criminal misconduct should lead to revocations of prior waivers, not the granting of a whole new set of waivers. We have the tools, and with the tools the responsibility, to empower those at the top of these institutions to create meaningful cultural shifts, yet we refuse to use them.
In conclusion, I am troubled by repeated instances of noncompliance at these global financial institutions, which may be indicative of a continuing culture that does not adequately support legal and ethical behavior. Further, I am concerned that the latest series of actions has effectively rendered criminal convictions of financial institutions largely symbolic. Firms and institutions increasingly rely on the Commission’s repeated issuance of waivers to remove the consequences of a criminal conviction, consequences that may actually positively contribute to a firm’s compliance and conduct going forward.
Excerpted from U.S. Securities and Exchange commissioner Kara M. Stein’s dissenting statement regarding waivers granted by the commission for banks pleading guilty to criminal charges involving manipulation of foreign exchange rates (May 21, 2015):
“I dissent from the Commission’s Orders, issued on May 20, 2015, that granted … waivers from an array of disqualifications required by federal securities regulations… Allowing these institutions to continue business as usual, after multiple and serious regulatory and criminal violations, poses risks to investors and the American public that are being ignored. It is not sufficient to look at each waiver request in a vacuum…
And today the Commission heads further down this path. After the guilty pleas, UBS was granted a waiver that was explicitly conditioned on compliance with the judgment in the LIBOR-related matter. That explicit condition has now been violated. Yet, the Commission has just issued UBS a new waiver.
It is troubling enough to consistently grant waivers for criminal misconduct. It is an order of magnitude more troubling to refuse to enforce our own explicit requirements for such waivers.
This type of recidivism and repeated criminal misconduct should lead to revocations of prior waivers, not the granting of a whole new set of waivers. We have the tools, and with the tools the responsibility, to empower those at the top of these institutions to create meaningful cultural shifts, yet we refuse to use them.
In conclusion, I am troubled by repeated instances of noncompliance at these global financial institutions, which may be indicative of a continuing culture that does not adequately support legal and ethical behavior. Further, I am concerned that the latest series of actions has effectively rendered criminal convictions of financial institutions largely symbolic. Firms and institutions increasingly rely on the Commission’s repeated issuance of waivers to remove the consequences of a criminal conviction, consequences that may actually positively contribute to a firm’s compliance and conduct going forward.
http://www.sec.gov/news/statement/stein-waivers-granted-dissenting-statement.html
[Don’t you wish us little guys could get away with what those big guys get away with?] [And we could cut the overcrowded prison population in half.]