Holding people accountable is ultimately the only way to bring about real change to the asset based finance industry through the criminal courts.

When the Government finally realises the enormity of the fraud (“it is better for us [abl] to get the money than HMRC”) being committed by a number of asset based lenders against HMRC and applies sizable cash penalties against these companies, it will be hard to find anyone who feels that the penalty is going to have any impact on the behaviour of some in the industry in the future.
There’s a simple reason for that: punishing the factoring company, rather than individuals, doesn’t get at the root of the problem. Shareholders (who are the ones effectively paying the fine) certainly deserve blame for tolerating—and, in some cases, arguably encouraging—factoring companies risky and dubious lending practices so they can gorge on hidden costs and termination fees
More to the point, if you really want to punish and, perhaps more important, deter bad business behaviour; you have to penalize the individuals who committed them. Instead, at least so far, the people who made the decisions to sign contracts in the knowledge that they knew were almost certain to go bad for the client. Set aside the question of criminal prosecution. They won’t even be forced to give up their bonuses or the salaries they got as a reward for putting together these corrupt deals. They will wrongly be able to keep gains that were, by any measure, ill-gotten.
Punishing individuals is especially important in the case of asset based lenders, because brokers, sales people, executives are incentivized to engage in behaviour that is incredibly lucrative for them (since their bonuses are pegged to short-term performance) but incredibly destructive to their clients. You can certainly fault asset based lenders for setting up such destructive incentive structures, and for creating a business climate in which shady behaviour is encouraged.
While banks did incredibly badly during the financial crisis, plenty of asset based lenders and their employees (including plenty of C.E.O.s) did incredibly well. And the fact that they’ve kept the money they made doesn’t exactly send the right message, while destroying perfectly solvent companies.
It’s true that since the media started exposing the industry some have tried to do a better job of making sure that the interests of clients, companies and employees are aligned. The reality is that short-term incentives are still incredibly powerful in the industry, and there are always going to be people who are putting their own interests ahead of those of the company—or, needless to say, of their customers.
Holding people accountable is ultimately the only way to bring about real change to the asset based finance industry through the criminal courts.