to wonder why bankers are never prosecuted for their financial crimes?

[killerlego]

Another day another banking scandal. Apparently several of the largest banks have been fined £2 billion for rate rigging. Of course any fines will be passed on to customers/taxpayers so we will all end up paying and they will continue with their corrupt ways. Why has no individual banker been imprisoned since the financial crisis? It cannot be that the world economy can be brought to its knees, special measures introduced which have many so many people much poorer yet nobody has been jailed for the massive ongoing crimes perpetrated by the banks both before and after the crisis started and in fact many of them have got richer (due to their asset prices increasing because of QE) and they continue to get huge bonuses and continue as they have always done. How can it be that someone can be imprisoned for stealing a bottle of water during the riots yet bankers have not been imprisoned for stealing billions/fraud? It is scandalous!

Probably because their best chums are running the country at the mo

People who support them claim that they are highly skilled and professional people and we should all be grateful to them, that they have brought us more prosperity than hardship. I can't bring myself to believe that, but I don't know how much of that is actual fact, or just the sense of unfairness that no matter how badly these people do and how badly they mess up, they still won't exactly understand the misery of struggling to put food on the table. Whereas the people that their mismanagement ultimately affects...

Because the gambling works and the rich get richer and they have all the money to do a media two-step to make it look like it's someone else's fault. So they get to keep the dough and we get to pay for it, just a small amount - not enough to complain about. Their giant pyramid scheme works.

Because they keep the average persons mind focused on things they can do little or nothing about like minimum wage versus living wage.

Because no one ever asks why if the interest rates are so low why I'm paying my mortgage company an extra 800 a month for the privilege of borrowing money that shores up our property system.

Because they give us 'benefit cheats' to hate - never mind that if all the people who claimed benefits that were entitled to it, it would outweigh cheating by a factor of 8 to 1. So it's negligible. Literally, irrelevant.

Because they give people just enough to make it look like they could do better (the vast majority can't), just enough to make them too focused on other things to complain, just enough to prevent revolt.

It's a very finely tuned house of cards. Some by design, some by circumstance.

Even in this post I've just written theres enough to argue about that would provide diversion - to keep us arguing/debating/discussing so that no one ever pays for screwing us over.

Bankers, politicians and big business are all intertwined in our system. There is no interest from the establishment to start putting each other in prison

Civil and Criminal Law are very different. I don't think they have been prosecuted because it's a civil offence, not a criminal one (at a guess). I also suppose it would be pretty difficult to prove that the people who did this, did it off their own back and it's not standard practice.

What they have done isn't illegal is it? You may think it should be, but it isn't.

The Serious Frauds Office are looking into whether they can make any criminal case against anyone involved - today's announcement followed a settlement between the regulators (FCA) and the banks. The FCA cannot prosecute, only refer to other bodies. So if there are people who broke the law then they can and will face prosecution.

In general it is very difficult to find one, or a select group of people who broke laws in cases like this. There is a large gap between regulation of companies (and people in those companies) and criminal law of individuals. Practices at banks, or within any industry, can be against regulation which is designed to protect the best interests of consumers and the market as a whole, without breaking any law.

Illegal and immoral are different! I worked in the City and saw many a deal that made me wince, nothing illegal, just (for my liking) too aggressively risky. Not that anyone was interested in my heretic views at the time.

Before people start shouting at me, I didn't chose to work in the aggressive/risk taking team and engineered a job in a "nicer" team as soon as I could.

Because they line the pockets of the Tory twats running the country.

even in your high street banks there is a lot of dubious practice, or there certainly was a few years ago. When I worked in one, before the bubble burst, there was all manner of slightly dodgy things done eg. applications processed for ficticious accounts/loans/mortgages to enable individuals to meet their sales targets. So, for example, someone would come in thinking that they were just enquiring about a mortgage, not applying for one. The sales advisor would present them with about a dozen pieces of paper to sign, telling them not to worry, they would sort all the paperwork out. Unbeknownst to the customer, in the middle of the bundle of papers was the mortgage application form. Then once the customer was gone, the staff member would fill out the rest of the form and voila, a mortgage application. By the time the paperwork went out, and the customer rang the bank all baffled because they hadn't applied for anything, they already had had a credit search done etc. Unethical, but probably not illegal.

Because the authorities would need to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Mr Smith, an employee of of The Bank, committed X crime/s on X days.

The penalties imposed recently have been civil penalties, imposed by the Financial Conduct Authority, under its regulatory powers whereby they are saying (roughly) that in general the banks have done things wrong.

There is a very different standard of proof to bring individual bankers to trial for a criminal offence.

I'm not saying this is right or wrong. Just, as someone else has already said, there is a difference between being immoral and being illegal.