Nearly six years ago, GAP client and former Citigroup executive Richard Bowen blew the whistle on malfeasance, ringing the warning bells for the financial meltdown that was to come. After being ignored internally, he filed a complaint under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and took his concerns to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is supposed to protect whistleblowers like Bowen, but instead also ignored him.
In 2009, he was fired and his ensuing legal battle is indicative of how little accountability or transparency has been demanded of the financial system that brought the world economy to its knees. In 2010, Bowen produced testimony for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which according to the article raised an “all battle stations” call at Citigroup, bringing into question the independence of the congressional investigation. Through intense pressuring from Citigroup and commission members, Bowen was forced to change and limit his testimony, essentially gagging the whistleblower from revealing the full story. More