In another setback to efforts by the trustee seeking to recover money for victims of convicted Ponzi-scheme operator Bernard Madoff, a federal judge has thrown out some claims against Italian bank UniCredit SpA and three other affiliated defendants in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit. The decision, made in an 18-page order on Tuesday night, is the latest in a series of losses in court by bankruptcy trustee Irving Picard in lawsuits against major financial institutions he has tried to hold accountable for allegedly aiding Mr. Madoff’s scheme. Read Wall Street Journal report [...]
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Sitting in the back of a courtroom where Texas tycoon R. Allen Stanford is being tried for fraud, retired IBM engineer Jim Eccles was eager to see the man accused of bilking thousands of investors in a $7 billion Ponzi scheme. Eccles, who lost his life savings, said he’d spent hours traveling on a bus for one reason. “I wanted to see the guy that stole my money,” the 76-year-old Austin resident said Friday, shortly before testimony resumed in the ongoing trial in Houston. Defense lawyers made a case for Allen Stanford’s innocence on Friday in a courtroom filled with people who said he had stolen millions of dollars of their savings. Some two dozen investors were at the federal courthouse in Houston to mark the third anniversary of the government closure of Stanford Financial Group in February 2009. During a break in the testimony, Angela Shaw, founder of the Stanford Victims Coalition, said that three years without restitution had made a mockery of those people. Read Reuters report [...] A senior U.S. regulator was “optimistic” on Monday about finding a framework for the world’s top economy to use global book keeping rules for investors to compare cross-border companies. “We are hopeful we can put forward a model,” James Kroeker, chief accountant at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), told Reuters. More than 100 countries, including Europe, use accounting rules from the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and are waiting to see if the world’s biggest capital market, with up to 12,000 listed companies, adopts them too. Although unlikely to emerge from Congress intact, the budget proposal released last week by the Obama administration would allow the Securities and Exchange Commission to add hundreds of RIA examiners. Increasing the SEC’s budget to $1.57 billion in fiscal year 2013, which starts Oct. 1, from its present $1.32 billion level, would allow for the hiring of 222 new examiners, according to the SEC budget request. More in Investment News [...] Once again, the Securities and Exchange Commission has embarrassed itself. Last week it let off the hook two hotshot former Wall Street hedge-fund managers who lost a bundle for the investors trusting them to manage their money responsibly. Instead of going to court on Feb. 13 and laying bare the sordid facts for a jury, at the last minute the SEC settled a civil suit against Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin of the now defunct Bear Stearns Cos (2942331Q). These were the hedge-fund managers who five years ago loaded up their two funds with billions of dollars of lousy mortgage-backed securities and collateralized- debt obligations, leveraged them to the hilt and, when the market for the securities soured in July 2007, liquidated the funds. Read Bloomberg report [...] A noted New York lawyer and Ponzi scheme victim of Bernie Madoff has signed on to help victims of a New Mexico swindler fight a flurry of so-called claw-back lawsuits that seek to recapture some of the $75 million lost by 600 investors around the country. More than 100 suits had been filed by the end of last week as the trustee for the bankruptcy case of Doug Vaughan worked to meet a deadline Wednesday for making any claims against people who may have profited from their investments in promissory notes with Vaughan and his Vaughan Company Realtors. More in the Wall Street Journal [...] Saul Katz called it the Madoff “vig.” Vig, or vigorish, is a gambling term, meaning the money a bookmaker collects on every bet taken, regardless of the outcome — a kind of dependable handling fee. To the court-appointed trustee suing Katz and Fred Wilpon, the owners of the Mets, the Madoff “vig” was, quite simply, evidence of the men’s implausibly unyielding faith in Bernard L. Madoff’s steady investment returns, and the men’s dependence on those returns to help finance their businesses and deepen their personal wealth. More in the New York Times [...] Occupy the SEC, a working group of Occupy Wall Street that includes former financial industry professionals, lawyers and concerned citizens, had been up until 5am the night before, editing and formatting a letter they had prepared as a public comment to the SEC. For months, OSEC met twice weekly to review the 298-page proposed Volcker Rule, conducting a diligent, line-by-line analysis of the document. Proposed as part of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Volcker Rule essentially aims to ban proprietary trading and ownership of hedge funds by banks. Between now and July, the regulating bodies involved—the SEC, the FDIC, the OCC, the CFTC and the Fed—are required to read public comment letters and issue final details on the Volcker Rule. More in The Nation here. [...] Securities Investor Protection Corp has asked a federal court to deny the Securities and Exchange Commission’s request to compel SIPC to allow victims of Allen Stanford’s alleged Ponzi scheme to file claims for compensation. In a court filing on Thursday, SIPC said that Stanford’s offshore bank involved in the Ponzi scheme was not a member firm. And because of this the law “does not authorize the liquidation of a non-member, offshore bank,” SIPC said in the court filing. More on Reuters [...] |
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