On Monday, France’s largest bank, BNP Paribas S.A., agreed to plead guilty in state and federal court to charges brought by the U.S. Department of Justice for violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and by the New York County District Attorney’s Office for related charges. As part of a settlement with multiple enforcement authorities, BNP has agreed to pay nearly $9 billion in penalties. In May, the DOJ secured a guilty plea from Credit Suisse AG to a tax fraud conspiracy charge as part of an agreement that includes $2.6 billion in monetary penalties. Some are quick to say that these resolutions open a new chapter in the government’s enforcement efforts against criminally culpable institutions and signal the end of the deferred prosecution agreement era, while others say that it either demonstrates or refutes that banks are “too big to jail.”

The real lesson to be learned, however, is that all aspects of an agreement—even the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction—are negotiable. While the popular conception has long been that a company’s guilty plea was tantamount to a corporate death penalty, the BNP Paribas deal, which stemmed from examinations by authorities into whether BNP Paribas evaded U.S. sanctions relating primarily to Sudan between 2002 and 2009, indicates that neither BNP nor the government views a guilty plea to be fatal. Likewise, Credit Suisse has, as a result of a comprehensively negotiated resolution, apparently emerged from its tax scandal largely unscathed.

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