Unbelievable! No one at MF Global, including Obama bundler Jon Corzine, will be charged in the mishandling (maybe theft) of $1 BILLION of customer funds. The Inspector General says there is not enough evidence of a crime.
Jon Corzine
The New York Times is reporting this morning that after ten months of investigation by federal prosecutors, sources say there isn’t even enough evidence to charge any of the firm’s executives in a criminal probe. The company may have failed spectacularly when it came to oversight and risk management, but the losses cannot be chalked up to outright fraud.
Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, writing at Breitbart (August 13, 2012) has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) LAWSUITS against the Securities Exchange Commission and other entities for MF Global “internal discussions,” including at the Treasury Department.
Our FOIA lawsuit, filed on behalf of Vern McKinley, focuses specifically on an October 31, 2011, meeting of the Treasury Department’s Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), during which MF Global was reportedly discussed. (As a reminder, Vern McKinley is a former employee of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and author of Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts.)
This IS a lawsuit against the Obama administration.
The funds belonging to other people didn’t just pay for janitorial services. If this is not one of the most indecent examples of cronyism yet, then it’s a joke.
The company placed a grossly outsized bet (more than $6 billion worth) on the health of the European debt market last year and when it went south, the firm “borrowed” money from the accounts of its customers to try and salvage its own losses. Most of the blame for those trades fell on its CEO (and ex-New Jersey governor) Jon Corzine, and while his reputation and firm are ruined, it seems he will escape any legal sanction. He could still face massive civil lawsuits or fines from regulators who have a lower standard than a criminal prosecution, but jail isn’t in the cards. Read the whole story here.
MF Global paid a Risk Officer close to $1 MILLION per year. That officer warned Corzine what he was doing was too ‘risky.’ He did it anyway because he was desperate to recover lost funds for his company (not his clients), in which he had about $50 MILLION personally invested.
Judicial Watch is also suing “to determine under what legal authorities lawful rationales the federal government initiated the Wall Street bailouts.” They have also filed “a number” of lawsuits on behalf of McKinley.
The glorified commission created by Democrats to investigate the nation’s financial crisis can’t get its act together despite a $10 million budget, a sizeable staff and more than a year to thoroughly probe the domestic and global culprits of the collapse…
It’s not like Americans are on pins and needles awaiting its findings, but as taxpayers they may wonder what the commission has done with nearly $10 million in public funds. Congress initially allocated $8 million then gave it an extra $1.8 million to hire about 40 employees, many of which already worked for the government and remain on their original agency’s payroll.
“The American people deserve nothing less than a full explanation of why so many people lost their homes, their life’s savings, and their hard-earned pensions,†Pelosi said last year while announcing appointments to the FCIC. Reid added that the commission would help the nation learn from “mistakes of the past through a transparent process†that would put the country on a road to full financial recovery.
But more than a year and millions of dollars later no one is really sure what the Democrats’ lauded financial watchdog has been doing or what its unearthed to help prevent another crisis. Source: Judicial Watch Corruption Chronicles
Biden explained that from the moment he and the president sat down to figure out their economic strategy, “Literally, the first guy I called was Jon Corzine. It’s not a joke. It’s not a joke. First of all, he’s the smartest guy I know in terms of the economy and on finance, and I really mean that.â€
Corzine proceeded to do exactly the sorts of things Wall Street has become infamous for: making crazy bets with other people’s money, counting on governments to bail out the private sector, and, allegedly, expecting to get friendly treatment from regulators. Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, was an old friend and colleague of Corzine’s at Goldman Sachs and in Washington. Gensler had been a key aide to Senator Paul Sarbanes and had reportedly worked closely with Corzine writing the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. At MF Global, under Gensler’s watch, Corzine bet more than $6 billion on the European-sovereign debt crisis, using borrowed client money. MF Global also apparently commingled client and company funds to pay off financial obligations, which is illegal.
I think Corzine did exactly what he was hired to do… it’s all about taking our savings and creating more dependents on the gov’t…..