Shaggy, the ubiquitous rap artist and former US marine, is not short of a dollar or two. The award-winning wordsmith pocketed millions in royalties as his most famous song, It wasn't me, shot to the top of the charts around the world. The song is about never admitting you are wrong – no matter what the situation. Even when caught red-handed "creeping with the girl next door", Shaggy insists the response should always be: "Say it wasn't you."

Investment bankers have adopted the tenets of Shaggy's ethically questionable message as gospel. A Google search on the phrase "neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing" produces 27,900 results. A casual glance through them shows the majority is about banks paying large sums of money to settle legal disputes while taking pains to point out that this constitutes neither an admission nor denial of guilt.