[plafl]

He got 2/3 of the shares necessary for gaining control. The Bank of Portugal was the only one who could prosecute money forgery and it was being acquired with forged money. This guy was a hacker.

I doubt he would have succeeded nevertheless. In the end the law was changed to apply to him retroactively, which was unconstitutional (and I'm sure it's still unconstitutional on most parts of the world), and that only to give him more sentence time. He would have been removed from the bank, one way or another.

[vmception]

When looking at other large investment banks, I think he would have succeeded

Whether it was HSBC’s opium trading

Or JP Morgan Chase’s fraudulent securities offering for a water company that decided to operate as a bank

There are lots of examples of maneuvering towards legal legitimacy

It really just depends on where your ambitions lie and what consequences you are willing to risk.

(note: all those banks are now results of many mergers and hardly represent their oldest branches)