SEC is accused of mishandling a whistleblower tip about financial crisis-era misconduct
When a Deutsche Bank whistleblower approached the agency multiple times, giving them plenty of evidence about misconduct, he says the SEC slow-walked its response and then “blamed him” for their blunders.
A decade after the U.S. financial crisis, Wall Street is booming and the economy is back–but nagging questions remain about the failure of government regulators and prosecutors to prevent the collapse, and to hold top Wall Street bankers personally accountable for the catastrophe. A year after the recession ended, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2010 slapped Goldman Sachs with a hefty $550 million fine, but it only charged a single, mid-level Goldman trader. Emails obtained by ProPublica‘s Jesse Eisinger and published by the site in 2016 shed some light on possible reasons why. In them, the senior SEC official who investigated Goldman lamented the “devasting [sic] impact our little ol’ civil actions reap on real people more often than I care to remember. It is the least favorite part of the job. Most of our civil defendants are good people who have done one bad thing.”