In the post-Dodd-Frank world, every Wall Street bank, it seems, has a rat.
This year has marked a turning point for regulatory action against the country’s largest financial institutions, with federal and state agencies moving beyond the misdeeds of the 2008 financial crisis and devoting attention to other fraudulent schemes, including money-laundering, tax-dodging and predatory trading.
That’s because frustrated Wall Street workers — emboldened by a beefed-up whistleblower program as part of Dodd-Frank financial reform — are finding it easier and potentially more lucrative to rat out wrongdoers within their own ranks, experts say.
“The whistleblower program was born out of the financial crisis and has been one of the great success stories of the statute,” said Jordan Thomas, chair of the whistleblower representation practice at law firm Labaton Sucharow.
On Monday, prosecutors are expected to wring a $9 billion penalty and a guilty plea from BNP Paribas to settle allegations that the French bank laundered money in blacklisted countries including Sudan, Iran and Cuba, sources said.
While the case against BNP dragged on for years, it started because of a tip from a single whistleblower, one source said.
Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Wednesday slapped Barclays with a suit, claiming the British bank lied to pension funds and other investors about predatory high-speed traders lurking in its own “dark pool” electronic trading platform. That case was also “aided significantly by a number of high-level former Barclays insiders,” according to the AG’s complaint.
Two Barclays directors were either fired or resigned soon after they refused to mislead an institutional client about how much trading they routed to the bank’s own dark pool, according to the complaint.
“Many of these organizations lack a culture of integrity, where doing the right thing was the only thing that mattered and speaking up was encouraged,” Thomas said.
The three-year-old whistleblower program — which guarantees anonymity, protects against retaliation and can provide much bigger payouts, including a $14 million award for a single tipster — is generating better tips for regulators, Andrew Cereseney, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s co-head of enforcement, said at a conference last month.
The newest big-ticket actions from regulators and prosecutors show that last year’s financial bogeymen — complex derivatives like collateralized debt obligations that exacerbated the housing crisis — haven’t been on the government’s radar as much.
That’s partially because other elements of sweeping Dodd-Frank regulation are supposed to make derivatives markets less risky and improve investor protections.