It pays to be white. If these CONVICTED CRIMINALS were African American 20-year-olds, picked up for having $10.00 in cannabis on them, they’d be cooling their heels in the joint for sure.
Four former Wilmington Trust executives facing multi-year prison sentences will avoid jail time, at least until an appeals court addresses the case.
U.S. District Judge Richard G. Andrews on Wednesday granted the executives’ request to remain free on bail pending the appeal of their criminal bank fraud and conspiracy convictions.
In an opinion, Andrews acknowledged that it is an uncommon reprieve. The law requires defendants seeking bail at this stage of a federal criminal case to show that their appeal raises a “substantial question of law,” the judge wrote.
It this instance, the legal question is over the hundreds of millions of dollars of delinquent loans to Delaware developers that were accumulating on Wilmington Trust’s balance sheet during the height of the Great Recession.
And how they should have been reported to financial regulators – and to investors.
It is the same question that persisted through six weeks of trial last year when prosecutors alleged that Wilmington Trust maintained “a second set of books,” separate from ones they disclosed to the feds, showing the true value of a deteriorating commercial real estate portfolio.
In an internal email, referenced in court documents, one Wilmington Trust banker had called those soured assets “credit turds.”
