A congressional panel will release its official take on the high-profile collapse of MF Global sometime in the near future. The House Financial Services Oversight Subcommittee announced Wednesday — the anniversary of the firm’s bankruptcy — that within a “few weeks” it would publish the findings of its yearlong investigation into how the firm fell and what happened to $1.6 billion in customer funds that went missing in its hectic final days. “Our investigation is essentially an autopsy of how MF Global came to its ultimate demise and what policy changes need to be made to prevent similar customer losses in the future,” said Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), chairman of the panel. “We must restore confidence and integrity to the futures markets and send a strong signal to customers that their accounts are safe and secure.”
More on The Hill [...]

A Year After MF Global’s Collapse, Brokerage Firms Feel Less Pressure for Change
When MF Global toppled a year ago, chaos engulfed a Chicago trading floor. Customers were locked out of their accounts, later discovering that about $1 billion of their money had disappeared. The debacle, which played out on the evening of Halloween, prompted federal authorities to immediately bear down on the brokerage firm and the broader futures trading industry. See New York Times report [...]

Something is still missing today, the one year anniversary of the bankruptcy of MF Global. Of course, we’re not yet being told who has $1.6 billion of customer funds still unaccounted for. If the SIPA Trustee James Giddens tells you he may be able to make customers almost whole, it’s from other funds recovered via negotiations from other sources. Not one organization has been sued, nothing has been clawed back, no one has been held formally responsible. Read more on Forbes [...]

As MF Global Holdings Ltd. MFGLQ 0.00% teetered last October, an accountant in its Chicago office got an urgent question from regulators: How much cash did the firm have left? It is supposed to be an easy question for brokerage firms to answer, even in the middle of a crisis. U.S. rules set tight controls on the accounting, oversight and movement of money that belongs to customers or firms themselves. “This will require a significant effort,” the MF Global accountant, Matthew Hughey, wrote in an email to seven colleagues at 4:24 a.m. on Oct. 27, 2011. A copy of the email was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The reason Mr. Hughey couldn’t answer the question for regulators: Employees at MF Global couldn’t keep track of exactly how much money it had at any given moment, even before the company began to wobble, according to Mr. Hughey’s email. Officials had been trying to fix the problem for months. More in the Wall Street Journal [...]

Experienced players know that the outcome of a game of chess often is determined in the opening moves, just as it is with many military battles or legal contests for assets, control and influence. It’s the way the world works. So, were MF Global customers up against a stacked deck from the beginning? When MF Global Holdings attorney Kenneth Ziman went to court the day after the firm declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, he appeared in front of Judge Martin Glenn, whom he had worked with previously at a law firm. The judge asked his former colleague: “I’ve read a number of stories that deal with alleged shortfalls in customer property. Is that only in the registered broker-dealer?” Ziman answered, “All funds are accounted for, and I’m talking about the broker-dealer.” With that, Judge Glenn said, “Okay.” No one, including regulators in attendence, disputed this misstatement or outright lie, and from then on, MF Global Inc. brokerage customers were on their own. Read more in Futures Magazine [...]