BNP Paribas could be facing the guillotine
Eric Holder’s Justice Department is pushing the French bank to pay a criminal penalty of at least $10 billion for allegedly dealing with blacklisted countries like Iran, according to a report on Thursday.
If BNP is unable to negotiate a much lower settlement to cap off the years-long probe, it would stand as one of the largest fines ever imposed on a bank in the US.
The mammoth penalty could also stagger the bank — and force it to raise money by selling stock, said Erin Davis, a bank analyst at Morningstar.
Such a dilution of shareholder equity — BNP, the largest bank in France, is worth about $100 billion — could bring the axe down on Chief Executive Officer Jean-Laurent Bonnafé.
“The one way to make a fine big enough to matter is to force a capital raise, which could force a management change,” Davis said. “When I see a number like $10 billion, I wonder if that’s the [reaction]” the government wants.
While the $10 billion criminal penalty being pressed by Holder, according to the report in the Wall Street Journal, is huge, it would still stop short of the $13 billion JPMorgan Chase paid last
year to settle claims that it contributed to the housing bubble.
However, the proposed BNP penalty would actually represent a much larger percentage of the bank’s assets than what Jamie Dimon’s JPM had to pay.
Prosecutors are also pushing to ban the bank from dollar clearing, which would effectively bar it from trading assets like oil, according to the WSJ report.
BNP could also be pressed to fire responsible individuals, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
Cesaltine Gregorio, a spokeswoman for the bank in New York, declined to comment.
Holder said earlier this month that he wants to end “too big to jail,” and that no bank should escape criminal charges because it might be systemically important.
While Holder talked the talk, his legal eagles didn’t walk the walk in settling a criminal probe against anther bank.
Credit Suisse paid regulators a $2.5 billion fine and admitted guilt for helping US taxpayers evade taxes by hiding money in Swiss banks.
But the settlement with the US Attorney General allowed Credit Suisse to sidestep stiff penalties that would have resulted in it losing its banking license.
That wasn’t so different from a $780 million fine UBS paid for setting up tax shelters, though that bank didn’t have to admit guilt.
Brady Dougan, Credit Suisse’s CEO, wasn’t forced out, and later said he was “encouraged that there will be very little impact on business as we go forward.”
That light touch might have been Holder’s plan all along.
“The Credit Suisse fine, while enormous, showed that fines aren’t really that meaningful,” Davis said. “The regulators and prosecutors don’t want to risk putting banks out of business.”