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Restore Our Faith In The Justice System

Mike

Well-known member
Yea, old Jon stole $1.6 BILLION from a bunch of farmers. No big deal.


The Justice Department’s MF Global Scandal Dates to 1932
By Jonathan Weil

There's an old saying in journalism that there are no new stories, only new reporters. The revelation that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's old law firm used to represent the bankrupt brokerage firm MF Global Holdings is a great example.
Here's the lead paragraph from an article yesterday on the right-leaning news website Breitbart.com, which was following up on an op-ed in the Washington Times:

"Those wondering why the Department of Justice has refused to go after Jon Corzine for the vaporization of $1.6 billion in MF Global client funds need look no further than the documents uncovered by the Government Accountability Institute that reveal that the now-defunct MF Global was a client of Attorney General Eric Holder and Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer’s former law firm, Covington & Burling."
It's great fodder for the scandal mill. It's also not a surprise. Covington & Burling, a powerhouse Washington law firm that was founded in 1919 by former Representative James Harry Covington, in recent years has represented JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and UBS, to name a few. It would have been more surprising if the firm had never represented MF Global. Corzine, for anyone who hasn't been paying attention, is the former New Jersey governor who was MF's chief executive when it collapsed.
When it comes to financial debacles and Washington, some players never change. Covington & Burling represented the disgraced Charles Mitchell of National City Bank (now Citigroup) at the Pecora Commission hearings held by the Senate Banking Committee during the 1930s. (The name came from the committee's chief counsel, Ferdinand Pecora, who investigated Wall Street corruption and fraud after the 1929 stock market crash. You can read more about Mitchell and the hearings in this excerpt from Michael Perino's superb book about Pecora, "The Hellhound of Wall Street.")
This isn't to say it's a good thing for the Justice Department's leaders to have such close Wall Street ties. It's not, especially when the government has brought so few fraud prosecutions related to the financial crisis. Whoever wins the presidential election this fall, here's a suggestion: Find an attorney general who doesn't have these kinds of connections. It would go a long way toward restoring Americans' faith in the justice system.(Jonathan Weil is a Bloomberg View columnist. Follow him on Twitter.)
 

Steve

Well-known member
At MF Global, his strategy was simple: “We are transforming from sort of an old-like brokerage firm into an investment bank,” Corzine told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. Key to his plan was a massive bet on European government bonds – a bet that would swell to more than $6 billion, and ultimately lead to MF Global’s collapse.

At the same time, Corzine was using a finance strategy known as “internal repo.”* In essence, MF Global was borrowing money from the firm’s own accounts and using it to fund trading in another part of the firm. During the summer of 2011, however, just months before MF Global filed for bankruptcy, internal repo was a strategy regulators were hoping to do away with.

internal repo transactions were so important to Corzine that he met with officials at the Commodities Future Trading Commission (CFTC) on three occasions to lobby for their preservation. As CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton told FRONTLINE:

Sen. Corzine was one of the more prominent individuals who came in and told us what a drastic mistake it would be to curtail the use of these internal repurchasing agreements … And when he told me that we were making a big mistake, it certainly put some doubt into my mind for a little bit there as whether or not we were going down the right course. But certainly somebody that had his stature … added respect, in my view.

Why is Jon Corzine Still Free? The 99% want to know!

The gist of Corzine’s defense is that he simply couldn’t understand where the money went.

An eviscerating article in Sunday’s NY Times called into question just how hands-off Mr. Corzine was. Citing inside sources, the Times says “Mr. Corzine compulsively traded for the firm on his Blackberry during meetings, sometimes dashing out to check on the markets.”

A presumption of innocence aside, Corzine’s having been an actively trading CEO yet claiming ignorance as to the clearing and processing activities of his firm falls somewhere between implausible and the lie of a financial sociopath.

investigators are currently negotiating with O’Brien, the assistant treasurer from Chicago, to waive her Fifth Amendment rights in exchange for immunity for her testimony about what actually happened in those last days.

The memo requesting a transfer of funds that likely included customer money, "per JC's [Jon Corzine's] direct instructions," was written by O'Brien.

for over 4 years now the wall-street has been vilified by the left,.. yet allowed to still operate with impunity.. leaving the criminals free to rape our country again...
 
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