Matt Levine, Columnist

BNP Compliance Officers Were Fine With Some Non-Compliance

I'm always so disappointed to learn what "sophisticated" methods big European banks used to violate U.S. law. Mostly it's just crossing out names and stuff.

July 1, 2014 at 3:07 PM UTC

By Matt Levine

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Lots of forms of financial skulduggery can be described as "sophisticated," but not all of them are. A classification might be:

BNP Paribas pleaded guilty yesterday to violating U.S. sanctions against Sudan, Iran and Cuba, agreeing to pay almost $9 billion to various regulators and prosecutors. Those regulators and prosecutors variously described its methods as "elaborate" and "egregious schemes," but they stopped short of "sophisticated." Because in fact the methods mostly went something like this: