Jim Armitage: Corporations can't trust the US justice system

The reluctance of governments to pursue crooked corporations through criminal trials has led to a flourishing of out-of-court deals where companies can buy off the justice system with cash.

In the US, they’ve become a mainstay of the economy, extracting billions of dollars from banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered.

These deals aren’t just a revenue raiser, though. In many cases, US officials also install monitors into the offending organisations to ensure the bad behaviour ends.

Get a “fail” from the monitor, and you pay more fines, as Standard Chartered found to its $300 million (£209.9 million) cost.

Monitors are hated and feared in equal measure in the banks they roam through. But there’s one good thing about them from the bank’s perspective: as part of the deal, their progress reports are kept secret, giving the offending banks breathing space to fix their procedures behind closed doors.

Until now.