Violation Tracker Documents Wide Variety of Misconduct by Major Banks

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Jun 28, 2016, 09:35 ET

WASHINGTON, June 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Since the beginning of 2010, two dozen major banks have paid $160 billion in penalties to resolve a wide range of cases brought against them by the Justice Department and federal regulatory agencies. Bank of America alone accounts for $56 billion of the total and JPMorgan Chase another $28 billion. Fourteen banks have each accumulated penalty amounts (both fines and settlements) in excess of $1 billion, and five of those are in excess of $10 billion.

Along with misconduct that helped bring about the financial meltdown of 2008, the cases have involved alleged offenses in ten other major categories.

These are some of the key findings of The $160 Billion Bank Fee, a report analyzing the data in Violation Tracker 2.0, an expanded version of a database on corporate misconduct produced by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First and available at www.goodjobsfirst.org/violation-tracker.

Violation Tracker, introduced last fall with environmental and safety cases, now also contains entries on 700 cases involving banks and other financial companies brought by the Justice Department and ten federal regulatory agencies. Also newly added are 600 cases filed against non-financial firms for offenses such as price-fixing, foreign bribery, and export-control violations. The database now contains cases from 27 federal regulatory agencies and DOJ.

"Violation Tracker 2.0 is another step in our effort to create a comprehensive database on corporate misconduct," said Philip Mattera, who heads the Corporate Research Project and leads the work on Violation Tracker.

The $160 Billion Bank Fee report focuses on a subset of the new data: 144 mega-cases with penalties of $100 million or more (not including private litigation) involving major banks. Among the other findings:

* Along with Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, the other banks with the most penalties are: Citigroup ($15.4 billion), Wells Fargo ($10.9 billion), the French bank BNP Paribas ($10.5 billion) and Goldman Sachs ($9.1 billion).

* The largest categories of cases are: sale of toxic securities and mortgage abuses ($118 billion in penalties), violation of rules prohibiting business with enemy countries ($15 billion), manipulation of foreign exchange markets ($7 billion) and manipulation of interest rate benchmarks ($5 billion).

* Of the 144 mega-cases, 24 involve criminal charges, though in two-thirds of those cases the banks avoided convictions through deferred and non-prosecution agreements.

Contact: Phil Mattera, [email protected], 202-725-7906

SOURCE Good Jobs First