![Shawshank Redemption Prison yard [my lawyer fucked me]](http://screwedus.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Shawshank-Redemption-Prison-yard-my-lawyer-fucked-me-300x211.jpg "Shawshank Redemption Prison yard [my lawyer fucked me]")
“What’ch you in here for?”
“Armed Robbery.”
“Guilty?”
“Nope. My lawyer fucked me.”
- from The Shawshank Redemption
Buried in the news this past week was a compelling story that personifies the degree to which the men and women of Wall Street and the financial world continue to evade responsibility for the personal destruction of trillions of dollars worth of shareholders wealth, all the while continuing to collect millions of dollars in compensation as they simultaneously took bailouts from American taxpayers, and avoid prosecution for their criminally fraudulent behavior.
“There is no individual liability in this case; there is no evidence that any individual is culpable.”
- Bank of America’s statement in a federal court filing
A U.S. District Court Judge thinks otherwise.
When Bank of America (BoA) was in the process of acquiring Merrill Lynch after the financial meltdown late last year, it intentionally failed to disclose to it’s shareholders that millions of dollars in executive bonuses where being paid to Merrill Lynch executives. When BoA tried to settle it’s litigation with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for $33 million this week over it’s corporate malfeasance, guess who they blamed?
Their lawyers!
The federal judge overseeing the case viewed all of this with a healthy degree of skepticism, and questioned why the SEC was NOT prosecuting even one of the BoA executives for it’s failure to disclose this bonus payout arrangement to it’s shareholders, intimating that someone is responsible for leaving that important piece of information out of an SEC document regarding financial disclosures. BoA executives say they authorized the filing of the disclosure upon the advice of staff and outside counsel, and that it was the lawyers that prepared the document. The judge rejected the settlement and decided that all BoA had to do was waive attorney-client privilege – - presumably so that an inquiry could be made to determine who advised BoA to file the document, what did the executives know (or should have known).
Now BoA is defiantly refusing to waive attorney-client privilege. Why?
Sounds like their lawyers not only screwed BoA, they all now likely screwed themselves and one another.
Oh damn, that pesky law of unintended consequences even applies to “really smart people”.