Maria Cantwell 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.

From coast to coast, the FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission have ensnared people not only at hedge funds, but at technology and pharmaceutical companies, consulting and law firms, government agencies, and even a major stock exchange.

Why should the court impose a judgment in a case in which the SEC alleges a serious securities fraud, but the defendant neither admits nor denies wrongdoing?

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.

Individual bankers are rightly being investigated by the police. I and all colleagues in the chamber hope that if criminality is proven, they will go to jail and bear the same brunt of punishment as any other criminal.

I'm asked, what about criminal prosecution of those on wall street? You know what, it's probably because none of them committed any crimes. They just made some incredibly bad decisions.

Yes! We finally captured Martha Stewart. You know, with all the massive and almost completely unpunished fraud perpetrated on the public by companies like Enron, Global Crossing, and Tyco we finally got the ring leader. Maybe now we can lower the nation's terror alert to periwinkle.

In the deregulated realm of US banking and finance, crime does occasionally pay for its foul deeds, not in prison time but by making modest rebates to the victims.

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.

The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.

The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.

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.

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

What transpired at Semgroup was no less than a $500 billion fraud on the people of the world.

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

We urge the Department of Justice to carefully investigate and aggressively prosecute all senior bank officials who participated in manipulating the London interbank offered rate throughout the financial crisis.

We have decriminalized Wall Street malfeasance.

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.

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

In the business world, we can point to instances when a lack of integrity has bankrupted entire companies - in sectors as different as finance, telecommunications, manufacturing, and energy.

If the government has any courage, it will punish those at the top of failed banks. Accountability is critical in every area of human endeavour - there has to be a penalty for failure; otherwise, it's only a matter of time before the economic pain our banks have caused to so many innocent businesses and homeowners is forgotten.

Holding individuals accountable for corporate wrongdoing isn't ideological; it's good law enforcement.

The Fraud Act 2006 makes it perfectly clear that Libor rigging is prosecutable as a criminal offence.

Not one Wall Street executive has been charged with crimes since the 2008 financial crash.

Last week convicted Enron crook Ken Lay died of a heart attack. They announced they were going to cremate him. Where he's going, why bother?.