A 60-year-old Las Vegas bookkeeper is going to prison for illegally transferring $200,000 between two unrelated companies. It’s unclear if she personally profited from it. Meanwhile, banks like Wells Fargo and HSBC pay continual fines for laundering drug money and not a single executive is criminally prosecuted.
This is not accidental. Former Attorney General Eric Holder pointblank said big banks would not be prosecuted because doing do would be injurious to them. Yes, he really said that, weeping faux tears all the while. I’m sure he will become quite wealthy now that he has left government.
“I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy,” Holder said, according to The Hill. “And I think that is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.”
Wells Fargo and HBSCÂ just pay fines for obvious criminal actions.
The [California] Treasurer’s office has long relied on Wells Fargo as a partner to meet the state’s investment and banking needs, but the bank can “no longer be trusted with the public’s money when it has shown such little regard to the regular citizens,” State Treasurer John Chiang told a news conference.
Chiang last May banned the U.S. subsidiary of HSBC from participating in California’s $6.5 billion deposit program after receiving reports of money laundering and tax evasion.
Back to the bookkeeper. Sure, what she did was illegal and wrong. However, why does she go to prison and bank execs don’t?
A former Las Vegas bookkeeper was ordered to serve four to 10 years in prison Tuesday for illegally transferring more than $200,000 between two companies, including one owned by the wife of a Nevada Supreme Court justice.
Records stated that Sparks used Antonacci’s signature stamp to write unauthorized checks, made unauthorized cash transfers and used Antonacci’s Office Depot card to take $201,096.22 from Antonacci’s accounts and move it to Leslie Parraguirre’s.