They don't get the benefit of the doubt. Prosecuting HSBC and its officers would be a mammoth undertaking costing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. T

They don't get the benefit of the doubt. Prosecuting HSBC and its officers would be a mammoth undertaking costing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. The reason HSBC (or any other large organization) pleads guilty or enters into a non-prosecution agreement is that it usually lets them off for less (on a risk adjusted basis) than fighting. The prosecutors also don't want to spend the several years in litigation so they get a scalp to carry in front of the cameras to claim that they are being tough. If we were serious as a country about compliance with our laws we would have just stripped them of their US banking license. Of course this would have rather large ramifications for many other people that would mostly be bad.