- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Neil Hodge2022-09-28T12:00:00
The United Kingdom doesn’t have a strong track record for bringing executives to book. Very often, boardroom culprits have usually fallen on their swords, taken their pensions, and sometimes even moved to greener pastures long before any regulator comes knocking.
The latest nonenforcement notice occurred Aug. 26, when the U.K.’s main financial regulators—the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)—ended their six-year investigations into former senior managers at HBOS and announced they would take no further action against the individuals for their role in the bank’s financial failure in 2008.
During the probes, the regulators said they gathered more than two million documents, conducted interviews, and pored through reams of contemporaneous evidence as part of their “forensic” and “rigorous” investigations to assess whether these senior managers failed in their roles and responsibilities. The result called for no enforcement action.
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Legal experts generally agree the U.K.’s record for prosecuting board-level executives for financial and economic crime could be better. But some believe there is a problem criticizing poor enforcement when the legislation in place has its own shortcomings.
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The Securities and Exchange Commission charged bankrupt fashion retailer Express with failing to disclose nearly $1 million in perks to a former chief executive, but did not levy a financial penalty thanks to its cooperation, the SEC said.
