Major French bank paying $1.3B in fines for bribing Libyan officials to win government investments

The bank’s subsidiary will plead guilty Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn to violating US laws against foreign bribery between 2004 and 2009, during the regime of Moammar Gadhafi.

When the truth about what really happened to Libya and Gadhafi is revealed, the world is going to be shocked. It’s absolutely incredible that the Western military industrial complex was able to get away with the destruction of that African country and the murder of Gadhafi himself.

The truly shocking thing is that the US population was only fooled into accepting this crime against humanity because of who happened to be POTUS at the time. Americans (and other Westerners) should all be ashamed of themselves for allowing yet anotherrepeat of the same destructive foreign policy that Eisenhower warned us about generations ago.

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While it’s nice to see folks responsible for some of this financial fuckery being held accountable, justice won’t be served until everyone responsible for Libya’s destabilization are duly punished.

via seattletimes:

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — A unit of one of France’s largest banks, Societe Generale, is pleading guilty in the U.S. and the bank is paying a $585 million fine for bribing Libyan officials to win government investments. The bank also is paying $750 million to settle U.S. charges of manipulating a key global interest rate.

The actions were announced by the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Under an agreement with the Justice Department, Societe Generale will avoid criminal prosecution on charges of manipulating the London interbank offered rate, or LIBOR, and will pay a $275 million fine. The bank is paying a $475 million civil penalty in a separate settlement with the CFTC.

The Justice Department said it was the first coordinated resolution with France in a foreign bribery case.

The action “sends a strong message that transnational corruption and manipulation of our markets will be met with a global and coordinated law enforcement response,” Acting Assistant Attorney General John Cronan said in a statement.

The LIBOR rate is used to set lending rates for trillions of dollars in transactions around the world, including mortgages, bonds and consumer loans. A number of major international banks already have paid settlements totaling billions of dollars in the rate-rigging scandal that broke in 2012. Units of JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, Britain’s Barclays, Switzerland’s UBS and Germany’s Deutsche Bank also have signed deferred prosecution agreements.

The bank’s subsidiary SGA Societe Generale Acceptance NV will plead guilty Tuesday in federal court in Brooklyn, New York, to violating U.S. laws against foreign bribery between 2004 and 2009, during the regime of Moammar Gadhafi.

In addition, Societe Generale signed a deferred prosecution agreement on related charges of conspiracy and transmitting false reports.

Societe Generale paid a Libyan broker more than $90 million to funnel bribes to high-level Libyan officials in exchange for investments from Libyan state agencies in Societe Generale, the Justice Department said. It said the bank secured investments totaling some $3.7 billion and reaped $523 million in profits from the scheme.

 

h/t axolotl_peyotl

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