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Learning from the French approach to white-collar crime and sentencing

By Douglas A. Berman

Forbes blogger Walter Pavl has this amusing new post titled "What Jerome Kerviel?s Sentence Could Teach Us In America."  Here is how it begins: Jerome Kerviel, formerly of Societe Generale SA, was convicted this week in France of fraud and sentenced to 3 years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $7 billion. Had Kerviel been sentenced under the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines he would have received about 100 years, but the fine would have been roughly about the same. The only job that he could get to pay back that kind of money would be, well, a trader on Wall Street. So I don?t see him paying this back anytime soon. What was interesting about this case was that Societe Generale was the victim here and had no hand in its own undoing. The sentence and the restitution fell solely on Kerviel and did not implicate the bank in any way...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on October 07, 2010 (boomark / email).