Deal makers often speak of leaks as potentially damaging to the transactions they attempt to build, citing secrecy as key to holding highly sensitive negotiations.
The question will be whether Mobil's sheer hunger for Kazakhstan's oil allows prosecutors to paint a different, and more damaging, picture of those transactions.
At the time, the agency said, "Strategic leaks, designed to be advantageous to a party to a transaction, are particularly damaging to market confidence and do not serve shareholders' or investors' wider interests".
But if we draw back from that isolated transaction, the deeply damaging dynamics become evident.
"The loss of investor confidence from these transactions has been very damaging," he said.
On top of the fine, BNP is likely to be banned from clearing US dollar transactions for one year, a damaging blow to its international business.
Perhaps the most damaging disclosures showed that many of the financial transactions of Pargav corresponded with the 18 destinations that Werritty and Fox visited together over the past 16 months.
He made it easy for the US to isolate Iran and impose damaging sanctions, particularly those imposed on its oil exports and financial transactions in 2012.
"Without a clear Brexit road-map a more damaging cycle of political and market uncertainty could be unleashed with subsequent repercussions for transaction activity globally.
That day, Mr. Brown provided damaging testimony against all the Rigases, describing a variety of accounting gimmicks, sham transactions and phony financial reports that helped Adelphia mask the eroding financial performance that led to its filing for bankruptcy protection in June 2002.
