Ms. White, who has been nominated to become the chairwoman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, ran the Justice Department’s unit in the Southern District, which includes Manhattan, from 1993 until January 2002. She is expected to appear at a confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.

Ms. White’s recent work as a partner at Debevoise Plimpton, where she represented JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and other companies, has come under scrutiny. Her record as a federal prosecutor of financial crime has received less attention.

Given that regulating financial firms will become her purview if she heads the S.E.C., assessing her pursuit of financial fraud as a prosecutor may provide clues to how she would run the agency.

Let’s just say her prosecutorial stint did not include a lot of cases against large United States financial institutions.

Last week, I asked Ms. White which large financial institution cases she was most proud of prosecuting. She declined to be interviewed but, through a colleague, provided a list.

First on that list was a 1996 case against Daiwa Bank, a Japanese institution that lost its license to do business in the United States after Ms. White’s office indicted it for fraud. Daiwa pleaded guilty and paid a fine of $340 million, then a record for a financial institution.

Another case she cited was the 2001 fraud case against Republic Securities, a unit of Republic Bank, which generated $600 million in restitution for clients whose accounts had been valued improperly by bank employees. It, too, pleaded guilty.

A third highlight on Ms. White’s list was a 1999 prosecution of Bankers Trust for misappropriating $19 million from dormant customer accounts. The bank pleaded guilty and paid more than $60 million in fines.

Those are considerable victories. Four other cases she cited through her colleague involved Ponzi schemes and fraud by small investment advisory firms, not household-name Wall Street or financial firms.

A review of her years in the Southern District also turned up several intriguing cases that Ms. White and her colleagues did not pursue or turned away. All three of these matters involved large and prestigious financial companies headquartered in the United States.

A big question mark, federal investigators say, still hangs over the decision by Ms. White’s office not to prosecute Citibank in the mid- to late 1990s for a possible role in questionable money transfers that benefited Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of the former president of Mexico. Between 1992 and 1994, Mr. Salinas, a consultant to a Mexican antipoverty agency whose annual salary never exceeded $190,000, somehow moved almost $100 million from Citibank accounts in Mexico and New York to Citibank accounts in London and Switzerland.

Banks have a legal obligation to prevent money-laundering, and in July 1996, Ms. White’s office opened an investigation into the Salinas transactions. But no prosecution against the bank or any of its officials involved in the Salinas accounts ever came.

A report by the Government Accountability Office in October 1998, as well as a subsequent inquiry by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, shed light on what can only be described as disturbing practices at Citibank. Its actions, the report said, helped Mr. Salinas transfer money in a way that “effectively disguised the funds’ source and destination, thus breaking the funds’ paper trail.” Citibank made $2 million in fees on the Salinas accounts, the Senate investigators found.

Mr. Salinas was arrested in February 1995 on suspicion of murdering his former brother-in-law, who had been a leading politician in Mexico. Senate investigators said the bank’s “initial reaction to the arrest was not to assist law enforcement but to determine whether the Salinas accounts should be moved to Switzerland to make discovery of the assets and bank records more difficult.” Mr. Salinas was convicted of the murder in 1999.

As it prepared its report in 1998, three years after Ms. White’s investigation into Citibank began, the G.A.O. requested information from federal prosecutors on the case. The G.A.O. was rebuffed. “Limited by the ongoing Justice Department investigation, we could not determine whether Citibank’s actions violated law or regulation,” the report said.

The case went nowhere. Ms. White declined to comment. But according to her colleague, who spoke to people who worked on the matter, money-laundering cases are tough to prove and must meet a higher standard than conclusions drawn in government reports.

ANOTHER matter that raised questions about Ms. White’s approach during that same period centered on insider trading by friends of Marisa Baridis, a Morgan Stanley compliance employee. In the fall of 1997, a New York State grand jury indicted Ms. Baridis on charges of grand larceny, securities fraud and accepting a bribe. According to the indictment, prosecutors in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, then led by Robert M. Morgenthau, had a tape of Ms. Baridis admitting she leaked confidential information about companies to brokers at other firms who traded on it.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/business/for-mary-jo-white-few-big-bank-cases-as-a-prosecutor.html?partner=rss&emc=rss