MF UNTOUCHABLE: Corzine Avoids Lifetime Trading Ban
Flashback from late February.
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From the ridiculous to the sublime...
James Koutoulas put out the following message on Twitter before the hearing...
I m sick of our govt hiding behind ridiculous excuses to protect criminals. Enough is enough. @nfa_news needs to do what the govt refuses to
— James Koutoulas, Esq (@jameskoutoulas) February 21, 2013
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Jon Corzine Avoids Lifetime Trading Ban As Regulator Punts To Feds
By Eleazar David Melendez
NEW YORK -- A private market regulator refused to ban former MF Global chief Jon Corzine from trading with other people’s money Thursday, rejecting a motion brought before that body's board of directors to do so.
The National Futures Association's decision is a blow to a vocal group within the commodities trading world who -- noting that Corzine has not been held accountable by the government for alleged crimes -- wanted to see him publicly upbraided by his peers in the market.
Corzine was CEO of commodities broker MF Global in October 2011, when the firm collapsed, causing about $1 billion in losses to consumers whose money should have been safely guarded in separate accounts. In spite of congressional testimony accusing Corzine of breaking the law in the firm's final weeks, he has not been charged with any crime and is rumored to be raising cash to start a commodities-focused hedge fund.
Christopher Hehmeyer, chairman of the private regulator the National Futures Association, said in a statement that the board of the organization "understands that there are ongoing investigations concerning Mr. Corzine's activities at MF Global and does not wish to take any action that could interfere with those investigations. Once the appropriate agencies have completed their investigations, NFA has the authority to bring disciplinary action against Mr. Corzine.”
Hehmeyer also noted Corzine had lost his membership in the organization following MF Global’s collapse and said, “If Mr. Corzine applies for membership in the future, he will not be granted membership unless NFA, after completing its fitness investigation, resolves those issues to its satisfaction.”
In deferring to ongoing government investigations, the NFA rejected the arguments made by members of the futures trading community who had said the organization needed to place a “lifetime ban” on Corzine in order to uphold the integrity of the markets.
John Roe, one of the directors who presented the motion before the board Thursday told The Huffington Post prior to the NFA’s meeting that market participants “just need to know that someone, somewhere holds people accountable. If that fails to happen, we need to do something.”
"If the NFA is going to let folks like that off, after they caused the first loss in consumer funds in segregation in the history of the United States, that's very concerning," Roe said.
James Koutoulas, another director who presented the motion Thursday,posted a message on Twitter just before the meeting stating he was “sick of our government hiding behind ridiculous excuses to protect criminals. Enough is enough. NFA needs to do what the government refuses to.”
Koutoulas declined to comment on Thursday's meeting, citing confidentiality agreements.
That Corzine's peers in the futures market should seek to ban him from associating with them professionally is only the latest in what has been a long fall from grace for the former Democratic governor and U.S. senator from New Jersey. Before his political career, Corzine led Goldman Sachs in the 1990s and helped take that investment firm public, to the awe and adulation of Wall Street.
The failure of the motion to ban Corzine from the markets did not come as a complete surprise to its supporters, however. Wednesday, Reuters led an article examining the proposal by noting it “faced an uphill battle."
Members of the NFA, according to Reuters, are loath to be seen as one-upping the Commodities and Futures Trading Commsision, the government regulator of the futures industry, which is conducting an investigation of Corzine. The federal Department of Justice is also investigating the matter.
"The last thing you want to do is ... jeopardize somebody else's ongoing investigation," Scott Cordes, an NFA board member, told Reuters.
Prior to the meeting and the board's decision, Roe admitted, “We may not be able to get done what we want to get done, but we need to buck the system and do something.” He declined to comment Thursday.
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Corzine congressional testimony:
'I don't know where the money went.'
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Reaction from Bob Knight that Corzine will not go to prison.
PG version:
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Adult version. Profanity warning.
For full effect, click play repeatedly.
More Corzine stories:
NYT UPDATE: 'No Criminal Case Likely Against Jon Corzine'
Biden: "Literally, The First Guy I Called Was Jon Corzine"
Letter From Satan: Dear Brother Corzine
Gasparino Reports MF Global CFO Told Investigators 'Corzine Should Go To Jail'
Raise Your Hand If You Would Like To Invest In Jon Corzine's New Hedge Fund
Apr 3, 2013 at 11:39 PM
Reader Comments (7)
http://dailybail.com/home/halloween-pics-jon-corzine-and-friends.html
These are pretty funny.
http://dailybail.com/home/mf-untouchable-corzine-wins-again.html
huh
Justice, are you druling, they protect eatch other as they have dont since time immemorial(14 days in this times, I am afraid, hehe).
And if you think, or belived WE where Conspirasy nuttcases, that tryed to explain how the System actualy works, and even more important, by Whom, and shrugging shoulders and laughed.
The only remedy that will work right now is to wack Your Head out od your own asses and wake the f... up.
And what is actualy the problem, is deseptions and scare mongering, if We the people throwed them all in Jail, and did what was necsesery to restore the economy, repeated by us all the time, there IS isnfact aternatives to the present Monetary system, no problem at all.
But there is a formidable obstacle in the path, the fear mongerings done by the same lame f... that broth us to this f... senario.
Justice is when THEY to stands at the Bredline, in the citys, then We the people Knows, that Justice is done, and the future can be build.
Look to Iceland, and learn.
Sice have nothing to do with the crime, and debbth can be erazed overnight.
If wars are stopped and the military witch is so f... bigg that the world combined is not even close to the sice of the USArmy.
Why are your goverment paranoic, and the idiotic war mongerings from the Zionists and Neo(cons), that sucks 50% of dayli income, to the military ind. complex.
And tax evations.
Solutions are present, what lacks is the implication of this rules, that is what We the People must deside, obviously since the goverment and the Law is corupt to the core.
And belive me, this goes to al lott of countrys, not only the UssA, but Spain a.s.o.
The Scandinavians are under attac, also.
Firsly.
Wake the f... up.
peace
http://mafiatoday.com/tag/federal-prosecutors/
[snip]
How America’s biggest banks took part in a nationwide bid-rigging conspiracy – until they were caught on tape
Someday, it will go down in history as the first trial of the modern American mafia. Of course, you won’t hear the recent financial corruption case, United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, called anything like that. If you heard about it at all, you’re probably either in the municipal bond business or married to an antitrust lawyer. Even then, all you probably heard was that a threesome of bit players on Wall Street got convicted of obscure antitrust violations in one of the most inscrutable, jargon-packed legal snoozefests since the government’s massive case against Microsoft in the Nineties – not exactly the thrilling courtroom drama offered by the famed trials of old-school mobsters like Al Capone or Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo.
But this just-completed trial in downtown New York against three faceless financial executives really was historic. Over 10 years in the making, the case allowed federal prosecutors to make public for the first time the astonishing inner workings of the reigning American crime syndicate, which now operates not out of Little Italy and Las Vegas, but out of Wall Street.
The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from “virtually every state, district and territory in the United States,” according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime...
...USA v. Carollo involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we’ve seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordinated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – “an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior,” as one former regulator described it.
More recently, a major international investigation has been launched into the manipulation of Libor, the interbank lending index that is used to calculate global interest rates for products worth more than $3 trillion a year. If and when that case is presented to the public at trial – there are several major civil suits in the works here in the States – we may yet find out that the world’s most powerful banks have, for years, been fixing the prices of almost every adjustable-rate vehicle on earth, from mortgages and credit cards to interest-rate swaps and even currencies.
But USA v. Carollo marks the first time we actually got incontrovertible evidence that Wall Street has moved into this cartel-type brand of criminality. It also offered a disgusting glimpse into the enabling and grossly cynical role played by politicians, who took Super Bowl tickets and bribe-stuffed envelopes to look the other way while gangsters raided the public kitty. And though the punishments that were ultimately handed down in the trial – minor convictions of three bit players – felt deeply unsatisfying, it was still a watershed moment in the ongoing story of America’s gradual awakening to the realities of financial corruption. In a post-crash era where Wall Street trials almost never make it into court, and even the harshest settlements end with the evidence buried by the government and the offending banks permitted to escape with no admission of wrongdoing, this case finally dragged the whole ugly truth of American finance out into the open – and it was a hell of a show...
...Only the presence of the mostly nonwhite and elderly jury, which resembled the front pew of a Harlem church, served as a reminder that the case had any connection to the real world. Even reporters from most of the major news outlets didn’t bother to attend. The judge in the trial, the right honorable and amusingly cantankerous Harold Baer, acknowledged that the case was not likely to set the public’s pulse racing. “It is unlikely, I think, that this will generate a lot of media publicity,” Baer sighed to the jury in his preliminary instructions.
http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-14/mary-jo-white-s-latest-conflict-of-interest.html
That's right. Mary Jo White will receive $500,000 per year from her Wall Street firm, Debevoise & Plimpton, AS THE CHAIR OF THE S.E.C.
I eagerly await rationalizations for this outrage from the Mary Jo White cheerleading squad.