Corporations can shift criminal guilt to subsidiaries while executives go uncharged

Evidence

The French bank BNP Paribas was criminally charged with illicit financial transactions with blacklisted countries, such as Iran and Sudan, in its U.S. operation. The bank went to great lengths to cover up those transactions and allegedly suggested extending the deception to the settlement itself. Individuals briefed on the proceedings reported that BNP proposed creating a new subsidiary and retroactively assigning the guilt to it (Protess & Silver-Greenberg, 2014a). BNP pleaded guilty to the criminal charges and was fined $8.9 billion. A unit of the bank was temporarily suspended from doing business, but its U.S. license was not revoked. The assistant district attorney reported that “[t]his conspiracy was known and condoned at the highest levels of BNP” (Protess & Silver-Greenberg, 2014a). However, neither the condoning executives nor their offending subordinates were criminally charged. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1585

The bank went to great lengths to cover up those transactions and allegedly suggested extending the deception to the settlement itself. Individuals briefed on the proceedings reported that BNP proposed creating a new subsidiary and retroactively assigning the guilt to it (Protess & Silver-Greenberg, 2014a). BNP pleaded guilty to the criminal charges and was fined $8.9 billion. A unit of the bank was temporarily suspended from doing business, but its U.S. license was not revoked. The assistant district attorney reported that “[t]his conspiracy was known and condoned at the highest levels of BNP” (Protess & Silver-Greenberg, 2014a). However, neither the condoning executives nor their offending subordinates were criminally charged. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1585

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how corporate criminal liability systematically insulates individual actors — the ‘personless crime’ structure as institutionalized moral disengagement.
• XREF: Connects to the broader moral disengagement thesis of the book: diffusion and displacement of responsibility operationalized at the corporate level.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1585