14yrs is a long time for something which seemed to structural to the fabric of the finance world at that time. From what he says, everyone was doing it and everyone new about it.
Exactly. That’s why these punishments don’t work. The fee needs to be known, and consistently applied, to act as a deterrent.
My idea for a financial-crime punishment system – use a published table, which references damage and punishment. So anything over $50M in financial damage to the society is death penalty, anything over $10M is life in prison, anything over $1M is 10 years. No excuses, no appeals; objective financial analysts do the calcs, and if you went over the limit, you get it. Simple math. Singapore-like hard core is proven to work. Right now they just play silly games, this won’t change anything; probability weighting says NPV is positive for financial crime.
Apparently he was paid 3.9 Mil. pounds from Citi in the 9 months until he was fired. Seems somewhat exessive for manipulating rates so I think the sentence is somewhat justified