Federal judge asks: Why haven’t any top executives been prosecuted for financial crisis?

[unhappycamper]

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/02/federal-judge-asks-why-havent-any-top-executives-been-prosecuted-for-financial-crisis/



Federal judge asks: Why haven’t any top executives been prosecuted for financial crisis?
By Travis Gettys
Thursday, January 2, 2014 0:11 EST

As the five-year statute of limitations nears for crimes that led to the Great Recession, a federal judge wants to know why no high-level executives have been prosecuted.

U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff said he could not be sure whether intentional fraud was committed in any particular case, but he pointed out that government agencies had found significant evidence to suggest wrongdoing in their own investigations.

“The stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary,” Rakoff writes in the New York Review of Books. “For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word ‘fraud’ no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a ‘systemic breakdown,’ not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.”

He dismissed claims by Department of Justice officials that proving intent would be too difficult, pointing out that federal prosecutors routinely did so by establishing that defendants acted in willful or conscious disregard of the law.

[Scuba]

1. Because Wall Street owns the Federal Government.

And several State governments.