British stock-market regulators are asking for authority to offer "U.S.-style plea bargains" to witnesses in major fraud cases in order to bring down the masterminds, the London Stock Exchange itself notes.

That authority is already part of a bill before Parliament. Like its more-or-less counterpart, the SEC, the U.K.'s Financial Services Authority has been hammered for not preventing the banking crisis.

Whistleblowers would be granted immunity, says a weekend story in the Guardian, if they testify against ringleaders. The FSA has often been referred to in the British press as "toothless." (Side note: Dental care in the U.K. has historically been less important, at least in terms of whiteness and straightness, than in the U.S. Even Ricky Gervais admits it.)

But crookedness is the point, and as previously reported, European finance ministers may be more interested than their U.S. counterparts in Barack Obama's administration in rooting it out — the Brits say they want stiffer regulation of, say, hedge funds rather than merely requiring such entities to be more "transparent," as Obama's minions have called for.

The U.K. government really does sound serious about pursuing gangbankers — instead of merely bloviating about it as congressman Gary Ackerman did last month in Congress.

Just as on Wall Street, these well-groomed financial gangsters have had the run of the City. So much so that, as James Lieber pointed out in late January in his monumental Voice story "What Cooked the World's Economy?" (yes, I know I keep referring to it, but it was good and it zoomed in on the real villains), AIG Financial Products, based in London, wreaked particular havoc on the U.S. economy.

In any case, there's a lot of tough talk coming out of Number 10 and the Financial Services Authority, the non-governmental regulator of U.K. markets, but one that has power at least equivalent to the SEC. The LSE's story says: