Dick Fuld and Jimmy Caine are grateful that in the US, punishment for corporate malfeasance typically amounts to a slap on the wrist. Because after nearly crashing the global economy, the two former bank CEOs got off with barely a slap on the wrist.
If the pair had been running banks in China when all that went down, it probably would have been a different story. For instance, Fuld probably wouldn’t have been alive to sit for all those ten-year retrospective interviews in late 2018 that helped soften his image as the CEO whose recklessness almost destroyed American capitalism from the inside out.
Compare that to this: On Friday, the former chairman of struggling Chinese lender Hengfeng Bank was sentenced to death with a two-year delay by a Chinese court. His crime? He was convicted of illegally pocketing $100 million while his Shandong-based bank headed inexorably toward failure, eventually becoming the latest Chinese regional lender to require a rescue and full-on nationalization by Beijing.
CEO Jiang Xiyun, meanwhile, was convicted of accepting bribes and illegal ‘accounting irregular’ tricks.
Hengfeng Bank said earlier this month that it would issue 100 billion shares through a private placement in one of China’s largest state-led rescues of small Chinese banks. – READ MORE