The very different media coverage of the recent LIBOR-rigging and drug mis-selling cases highlights the unfairness that the financial industry must contend with.

Boy, I love the internet. In researching an item about Barclays and its travails over the LIBOR-rigging business, my searches on Google News showed there are 217,000 results if you type “Barclays.” But if you type “Glaxo” to get data on the giant UK-pharma firm, the figure is 6,990 (as of the time of writing on July 27).

So what? Well, Glaxo recently forked out a cool £1.9 billion fine (around $3.0 billion) to settle one of the biggest healthcare scandals, if not the biggest, in US history, far in excess of the £290 million sum slapped on Barclays by UK and US authorities for the interbank rate rigging affair. (Other banks are thought to be in regulators' sights.) It is also way more than the $780 million that UBS paid the US in 2009 to settle civil charges of aiding tax evaders. And while everyone seems to hate bankers these days, it seems at first glance to be rather odd that manipulation of interest rates should anger people more than mis-selling important drugs such as anti-depressants. 

Some details: The UK’s largest drugmaker was punished by the US Justice Department for mis-selling medicines to patients in the US. In early July, the firm admitted publicly to mis-selling offences that, according to media reports, had been raised by a Glaxo manager to his colleagues as far back as 2001. That whistleblower, Greg Thorpe, eventually left the firm and in 2003, brought legal action against Glaxo. A few days ago, the drugmaker’s chief executive, Sir Andrew Witty, said he was “very sorry” for the group’s actions, according to media reports.

What this affair highlights is the role of so-called “whistleblowers” inside large organizations. A difficulty in the case of the wealth management sector is the ability of such people to operate in countries where disclosure of alleged wrong-doing puts them at odds with national laws about use of confidential client information, as in Switzerland. Disclosing client data in Switzerland, for example, happens to be a criminal offence. Even in jurisdictions where bank staff must disclose suspicious transactions to authorities (as in the US or UK), it is sometimes not always clear just how much latitude a “whistleblower” has. And given the straitened circumstances of our age, does a relationship manager, such as a young graduate just starting on a career, want to put his job on the line if the position is legally unclear? This is an issue this industry must grasp.

But to return to my first point, it is astonishing, if you think about it, that when Glaxo was fined to such an extent, coverage of this story has been relatively mild compared with the very public flogging of Barclays and its former CEO, Bob Diamond. None of this, I should stress, is a plea for sympathy for a banking industry that needs to restore trust through honest dealing. It is, nevertheless, a disturbing sign of how different sectors of the modern economy are being treated very differently by the media and our political class. The cloud left by the 2008 credit crisis will take a long time to blow away.