Rather than bringing criminal charges based on a specific underlying transaction in which a bank or other financial institution failed to file a Currency Transaction Report or Suspicious Activity Report, federal prosecutors are charging financial institutions with an overall failure to maintain an effective program to prevent money laundering.
They claimed that the takeover deal was "unfairly" priced and that the News Corp board of directors failed to challenge Mr Murdoch about the terms of the transaction.
What came clear in some of the testimony was that when they were reprimanded, either they had failed to generate enough profit for the firm in a particular transaction, they hadn't generated enough revenue for the firm or they hadn't demonstrated that they were smarter than the guy on the other side of the trade.
Morgan Chase was grilled on national television last year in the Senate's Enron hearings, which failed to uncover a smoking gun at the bank or force it to restate a single transaction.