The Libor (Lying Inconsolable Banksters Or Robbers) scandal is yet another financial trainwreck that literally affects everyone around the world. Barclays, a British multinational banking institution headquartered in London, was fined a total of $450 million, or £290 million, for manipulating the fixed rates of London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and the Euro Interbank Offered Rate (EURIBOR).
It was agreed that “the manipulation of the submissions affected the fixed rates on some occasions”.
The manipulation occurred between 2005 and 2009, which benefited Barclays and other banks also.
While it is claimed that most are not affected by Libor, a BBC report explained that it does indirectly affect borrowers. The investors, or customers could have been the biggest losers in this deal.
And guess what? Timothy Geithner and other authorities knew about the Libor international rate-fixing as early as 2007. From The Daily Beast: “Still, U.S. authorities did not initiate a public plan to fix the LIBOR misreporting—nor did it inform the markets that their trillions in LIBOR-indexed assets were being manipulated.”
A clip from The Guardian exposed a tax avoidance scheme by Barclays in 2009. “Tax benefits were to be generated by an elaborate circuit of Cayman islands companies, US partnerships and Luxembourg subsidiaries.” In 2007, the plan was to sink more than $16 billion (£11.4 billion) into U.S. loans.
On July 3, 2012, Barclay CEO Bob Diamond resigned because of the controversy that surrounded the uproar. In 2011, Diamond received an annual bonus of £6.5 million, the largest of any CEO of a British bank. After walking away from this scandal, Diamond will receive £2 million, instead of the £20 million bonus that was coming to him.
Financial scandals are becoming routine and this is very troubling. Corporate executives have resigned in recent times, but not one was arrested for these egregious crimes.
Is it really a mystery that 62% of Americans think that corporate corruption is widespread across America?
The line that says it all: “Dude. I owe you big time!… I’m opening a bottle of Bollinger.”
