We have another case today (published in iNews Briefs) of banking fraud. The story is headlined “Banks accused of rigging Canadian rate benchmark”.

It involves “Nine large banks, including six from Canada”, who have been accused of “conspiring to rig the Canadian Dealer Offered Rate from Aug. 9, 2007, to June 30, 2014.”

They potentially made billions of dollars of improper profits by trying to reduce the interest they owed their investors!

This follows after at least ten other banking crimes – Wells Fargo (through Wachovia they bought out) – money laundering for Mexican cartels; Chinese banks – underground banking industry for processing illegal money transfers; JPMorgan Chase, Citicorp, Barclays, The Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS – Forex market manipulation ; Barclays and Chase Manhattan Bank collusion with the Nazis; HSBC – laundering illegal funds from Mexican drug cartels, the North Korean and Cuban regimes, and Saudi Arabian terrorists; Deutsche Bank (and others un-named) – LIBOR where banks fudged their borrowing numbers; Wells Fargo (again) – illegally seizing cars belonging To US Service members; Bank of New York Mellon (and others) – shaving money from pension accounts; BCCI – money laundering for drug cartels and military dictators; and last but not least the US Fraudulent Mortgage Scam And The Great Recession – where bankers provided loans to almost anyone who asked. As a result, businesses were building more homes than people could actually afford, which flooded the market. the United States entered into the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression. Due to paperwork and accounting errors, banks even foreclosed on properties they shouldn’t have.

And that brings us back to Cayman when a bank here foreclosed on one of their customers who owed them just $3,000! Under the banking loans laws in the UK that could not happen.

The next question is how many banking employees, who perpetuated these crimes, were prosecuted and went to prison?

Answer. Very few – if any.

Kenneth Peasnell, distinguished professor of accounting at Lancaster University management school, said it well when he suggests that this question “is driven by a sense of unfairness, there being one rule for the rich and powerful and another for the rest of us … The wealthy seem to get a slap on the wrist for not paying their taxes while the single mother gets locked up for cheating on benefits”.

When George Osborne was UK chancellor, he warned the US government that criminal charges against HSBC could lead to global financial disaster!

There are bankers who have been sent to jail but that is not the norm. And the main reason is it is hard to prove wrongdoing, and it’s not illegal to run a bank into the ground.

And last, why my heading?

We don’t have a Robin Hood to fight the Sheriff of Nottingham aka *****!