You could keep a brothel, deal in firearms and engage in “wanton or furious driving”, all at the same time, and still end up with a shorter prison sentence than that received by Tom Hayes, a former investment banker who on August 3rd got 14 years for market-rigging.
Mr Hayes was found guilty of eight counts of fraud by a court in London. The judge, Jeremy Cooke, called him “the hub of the conspiracy” to rig LIBOR, a benchmark interest rate. The nature of his offence is less easy to explain than, say, burglary, making explosives or cannabis-peddling—other offences that carry 14-year sentences in Britain. He made his employers—UBS and then Citi—hundreds of millions distorting LIBOR to suit his trading positions. Interest rates on lending worth trillions, from mortgages to corporate loans, were swayed by Mr Hayes’s schemes to bolster his bonus.
The sentence is steep by financiers’ standards, too. Beyond Bernie Madoff, the Ponzi-schemer who copped 150 years in American jail, few white-collar criminals spend more than a year or two behind bars. Other crooked traders, including Kweku Adoboli, a former colleague of Mr Hayes...
from The Economist: Finance and economics http://ift.tt/1HtomEj
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