The following is a socio-legal ipse dixit, as a visceral response to the true culture of Banking, known in the depths and shadows of an eclectic handful of ‘all-knowing, I-told-you-so-people’, but only now emerging to the disgust of the general public.

 

One of the reasons I have been drawn to fraud, bribery, and corruption as my speciality, is that it is an area of Law at the cutting edge of all that is grey as an intersection between civil law, and criminal law.

 

From an objective perspective, it is interesting and fascinating to observe various aspects of human-nature and behaviour interacting with circumstances which give rise to manipulation of the volatile, and not-so-volatile, as well as dealing with various emotions from all concerned, both victim, and offender, and alleged offender.

 

From a subjective perspective, I am both excited and disgusted by acts of fraud, bribery, and corruption. The very ‘clever’ frauds, become, ‘not-so-clever’ frauds when discovered. I am excited to work out how the drama unfolds, whilst at the same time, passionate to understand how to detect and prevent such offences from re-occurring. It can be a nasty business and fraud ruins individuals, families, companies, employees and employers, the old and vulnerable, and all aspects of community and society. Wherever an opportunity arises for someone to be ‘had’, a fraudster is lurking not so far away as an opportunist to break or bend a system that is capable of being overridden.

 

Fraud, bribery, and corruption dislodge wider society issues and creates instability, confusion, and distrust. It should have a bearing on the very fabric of society. If not, and we do not care, but express apathy, then we are doomed to commit ourselves to a downwards spiral of gloom and eventual chaos. As William T Gossett puts it (no doubt, with a drink in his hand), “the rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however well-intentioned, generation.” As a fraud lawyer, what I see in society today is a rapidly increasing erosion of the rule of Law, or perhaps a better way of putting it, a lack of respect for Law and Order. The obvious, most recent example – Barclays. Traders decided that the Law didn’t apply to them. In some Nietzschian sub-plot, these Ubermenschen perhaps considered themselves ‘above or beyond the Law’.

 

The Law has been an ineffective irritation to the culture of greed and narcissism which has continued to brew and mature over the Centuries in the Banking Industry. Geoffrey Chaucer’s reference in the Pardoner’s Prologue, and Tale, wrings true: radix malorum est cupiditas. Perhaps these Bankers and Traders are to be perceived from a different perspective. In today’s norms of lack of faith, rejection of religion, rejection of Law, lack of respect for parents, and teachers, and Authority generally, have their actions been the act of the devil, really?

 

If we were living in hell, would the actions of the devil be considered so outrageous, or moreover acceptable given the norm? I postulate and refer to a well known passage from Tom Wolfe’s thought-provoking book, ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities’: “If you’re going to live in a whorehouse, there’s only one thing you can do: Be the best damn whore around”.

 

What’s my point?

 

Many of the population have been indignant this week over the Barclays scandal, and rightly so, but do these Traders and Bankers simply represent the best whores in a society where the balance has tilted in their favour in this materialistic World of ours? To greed? To the culture of self-interest and narcissism? To thinking that lying is acceptable as long as we can get away with it, where respect for Law and Order is diminishing, mainly because of ineffective

 

Law and de-moralising lack of resources for enforcement; where fraud, bribery, and corruption is so manifest that we are impervious and numb to the shock of this social wrong (to those of us who still consider it so) ….. acceptable.

 

Is the level of apathy so high, that we have forgotten what is and is not intrinsically good any more?  Examples

 

• Personal Injury fraud in society – at unprecedented levels
• Mortgage application fraud – exaggerating earnings for self certified mortgages – rife – in the hundreds of thousands in the last decade
• Statistics on lies told in CV’s – at unprecedented levels
• Last summer’s riots – the propensity of the rioters to want to steal consumer goods rather than protest

 

 

 

 

I see anti-fraud, anti-bribery, and anti-corruption measures as the final obstacles before chaos, and the answer to this conundrum will perhaps require a seismic shift in Society’s perception of what values matter, and what we hold dear as altruisms, rather than punishing a few of the best whores.

 

 

 

Professor Rosen (@profdavidrosen) is a Solicitor-Advocate, Partner, and head of Litigation at Darlingtons Solicitors (@darlingtons_). He is a Certified Fraud Examiner with the ACFE, a working member of the Fraud Advisory Panel, and a visiting Associate Professor of Law at Brunel University (@BrunelLaw).

 

(c) Prof David Rosen, 2012