Eric Holder is talking a “big” game.
The US Department of Justice chief is preparing criminal charges against at least two banks in a move to end “too big to jail’ institutions, the Attorney General said in a video posted Monday on the Justice Web site.
In fact, federal prosecutors are close to obtaining a guilty plea and a settlement of more than $1 billion from one of the banks, Credit Suisse, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday night.
While Holder didn’t name names in the video, prosecutors have been clamping down on a Citigroup subsidiary, BNP Paribas, and Credit Suisse, according to people familiar with the investigations.
Justice is looking into Citi’s Mexican banking unit, Banamex, according to a regulatory filing on Friday.
BNP Paribas, France’s second-largest bank, allegedly did business with blacklisted countries like Sudan, while Credit Suisse is said to have provided illegal tax shelters, one person said.
Prosecutors from Justice, US Attorney Preet Bharara and Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., are exploring ways to hit Credit Suisse and BNP with criminal charges without putting them out of business, source said.
One way to do so would be to strip them of their ability to use dollars for clearing transactions, according to the source.
The department’s punishment would be harsher than when it pursued HSBC for helping Mexican drug cartels launder money and doing business with banned countries like Iran.
HSBC, the largest European bank by assets, paid $1.92 billion in fines instead of pleading guilty.
“It’s nice [Holder’s] getting around to it after letting HSBC fund the local drug trade and pay a speeding ticket,” said Marcus Stanley at Americans for Financial Reform in Washington D.C.
The announcement signals that the US probably won’t take any legal action against banks that had a hand in the 2008 financial crisis.
“Sometimes a company’s conduct may be wrong, may be hard to defend, but may not violate the criminal law,” Holder said.
Holder acknowledged that there could be repercussions to going after banks, but said that wouldn’t stop him.
“There’s no such thing as ‘too big to jail,’ ” Holder said.