Sally Yates Quotes

I want to be clear. No company is too big to be prosecuted. We have zero tolerance for corporate fraud, but we also recognize the importance of avoiding collateral consequences whenever possible.

But I can't take responsibility for criminal conduct of somebody inside the company.

When the SEC needs to be deterring corporate wrongdoing, the 'penalty pilot' program sends the wrong message.

Corporate 'citizens' are the leading outlaws. They may regularly violate the law without surrendering their political rights.

It would be a sorry world in which corporations engaged in fraud could pull the screen of the First Amendment over any investigation of their scheme.

I take responsibility for what happened at Enron, both good and bad. But I cannot take responsibility for criminal conduct that I was unaware of.

Where there is flagrant abuse of corporate entities we must and will seek to tackle it.

When then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued me in 2003 over my stewardship as a director of the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE's legal expenses were more than $100 million, which made it perhaps the priciest litigation in the state's history.

Ken Lay has, does and will continue to accept responsibility for the fall of Enron. He was the man at the controls. But failure is not a crime.

… too big to jail

Americans should never believe, even incorrectly, that one's criminal activity will go unpunished simply because it was committed on behalf of a corporation.

At D.O.J., we don't want to go after the corporate wrongdoers simply as an end unto itself; we want to decrease the amount of corporate wrongdoing that happens in the first place. We want to restore and help protect the corporate culture of responsibility.

You don't want another Enron? Here's your law: If a company, can't explain, in one sentence, what it does... it's illegal.

Before Enron, I think people were a bit more naive about the way things worked, and I think Enron pulled the curtain back on unsavoury practices that turned out to be a lot more widespread.

We have witnessed the most educated, successful, and monied professionals in the country put their companies - not to mention their own liberty - at risk by engaging in flagrant and foolhardy illegal conduct.

If you prosecute a CEO or other senior executive and send him or her to jail for committing a crime, the deterrent effect in my view vastly outweighs even the best compliance program you can put in place.

If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.

The worst story I ever wrote was after the conviction of Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay. My co-author and I wrote a piece for 'Fortune' saying everything's going to be different now.

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for 'Barron's' magazine and I found a lot to write about.

I take full responsibility for what happened at Enron. But saying that, I know in my mind that I did nothing criminal.

People are treating the Stewart case as seriously as Enron when it's really over trivia.

Only the corporation that shirks from the light would have anything to fear from government. About the welfare of such corporations we need not be over-sensitive.

It should be as much the aim of those who seek social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence.

…the new front of great corporate transgression.

Acts of individuals are individual. As such they should be tried and punished.