Two of the world’s biggest banks, facing the threat of criminal charges, are mounting final bids for leniency, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. To avoid the fallout from pleading guilty — no giant bank has done so in more than two decades — BNP Paribas and Credit Suisse made last-ditch appeals to prosecutors and regulators in recent weeks. The private meetings came after prosecutors sought guilty pleas from the parent companies of both banks: BNP of France over doing business with countries like Sudan that the U.S. has blacklisted, and Credit Suisse for offering tax shelters to wealthy Americans. While BNP and Credit Suisse proposed more modest guilty pleas from their subsidiaries rather than parent companies, prosecutors appeared to balk at those overtures, challenging broader public concerns that banks have grown so important to the economy that they are effectively “too big to jail.”
