Bloomberg reports:
For financial regulators, 2016 was the year of the individual.
Executives faced four times as many financial misconduct probes by enforcement agencies in the U.K., U.S. and Hong Kong as firms did last year following the introduction of programs to hold individuals accountable, according to a report by New York-based corporate finance advisers Duff & Phelps.
Apparently this may be the start of an important new trend:
“It is now widely accepted that new regulations will likely lead to even more enforcement actions against individuals,” Korek said.
This is a point I have addressed serval times on this blog, perhaps most notably in my post Who should pick up the tab when a corporation is fined?, in which I argued for the proposition that liability should be imposed on the culpable individuals rather than the entity. I hope you go read the whole thing and follow the links to earlier posts.
In addition, I refer you to a new paper by Gregory Gilchrist that makes a rather nuanced analysis of the arguments on both sides.
