At least this prosecution is related to a few billion dollars as opposed to the tens of millions with previous cases. As mentioned before, it's not to dismiss the amount of money involved, but in the big picture this is still a rounding error. The big fish have been ignored and instead, the public is supposed to be happy about these side shows.
Outside of political insider circles, most people are more in line with the "prosecute Goldman Sachs or quit" thinking as opposed to this. Notice how like Madoff, this guy made the fatal error of losing money for businesses larger than his. The old boy network hates to be burned by the small time players.
When we spend trillions to rescue the rich and are then stuck with years of a soft economy, people expect more.
Prosecutors said Lee Farkas led a fraud scheme of staggering proportions for roughly eight years as chairman of Florida-based Taylor Bean & Whitaker. The fraud not only caused the company's 2009 collapse and put its 2,000 employees out of work, but also contributed to the collapse of Alabama-based Colonial Bank, the sixth-largest bank failure in U.S. history.
The jury returned its verdict late Tuesday after more than a full day of deliberations.
Colonial and two other major banks — Deutsche Bank and BNP Paribas — were collectively cheated out of nearly $3 billion, prosecutors estimated. Farkas and his cohorts — six of whom entered guilty pleas to related charges and testified against him at the two-week trial in U.S. District Court — also tried to fraudulently obtain more than $500 million in taxpayer-funded relief from the government's bank bailout program, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
