Timely Objections Blog

United States v. Standard & Poor's

By R Tamara de Silva

January 5, 2013

       The Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit yesterday against one of the of big three credit ratings agencies, Standard & Poor's ("S&P") and its parent company, McGraw-Hill, Inc.[1]  The suit alleges that S&P deliberately gave its coveted triple-A ratings to sub-prime debt in order to win fees.  The suit does not address the structural conflicts of interest within the three credit ratings agencies that are Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations ("NSRO"), nor will it address or cure any of the underlying causes of the credit crisis.  While there are problems with the credit rating agency business model, it will be difficult to prove that S&P knew any more than even the audit committees of the investment firms on whom it relied, or the issuers of debt instruments themselves.  The suit will of course result in the levy of a fine.  But while S&P's hands may not be entirely unsullied- far more importantly to the untrained public eye, they are as good a scapegoat as any other.

       S&P is a credit rating agency whose business is to provide credit ratings represented by letters from triple-A to D, in exchange for fees.  Federal laws require that certain institutions only hold investments that have a credit rating of "investment grade," but most of the financial world relies on credit ratings agencies to weigh and measure risk, risk defined in terms of the credit worthiness of investments and institutions.    S&P is the largest of three credit ratings agencies that is recognized by the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") as an NSRO.   From 2004 towards the end of 2008, S&P assigned credit ratings on nearly $4 trillion of debt instruments.  In terms of sheer size and credibility, despite this suit and skepticism of the NSROs particularly in Europe, the world has no credible alternative to credit ratings agencies and specifically nothing to replace, Standard & Poors.

       Keep in mind that almost five years after the worst financial crisis in United States history, the Department of Justice has yet to criminally charge a single culpable senior executive or firm.  If history is any guide, the Justice Department will reach a civil settlement with S&P wherein the firm will agree, without admitting any wrongdoing, to pay a fine that in relative terms, will have as large a fiscal impact on S&P as the cost of one month's dry kibble would have to the owners of the Grumpy Cat.  The suit asks for a fine in excess of $1 billion but these will typically be negotiated down and the government has not latterly demonstrated a willingness to go to trial with these suits.  Like so many Wall Street settlements reached over the past ten years, the cost of the settlement fine imposed will ultimately be a pittance relative to the quarterly earnings of the offending firm-S&P is not likely to become the first exception to this rule.

       There in the gilded annals of academic and economic theory yet remains the tidy axiom that markets are self-correcting.  It is thought that market forces of supply and demand will drive out weaker competitors and bring in new ones through their own determinative natural selection.  It is not necessarily so.  Yet this assumption is an inescapable cliché of economic theory now unfortunately embedded into political discourse.  This axiom ignores the asymmetrical political and economic power of some market participants relative to others, and the use of regulation to give some participants a structural competitive advantage over others.  Self-correcting economic behavior occurs famously in the instance of market bubbles like tulip manias, Internet stocks and real estate bubbles, all of which eventually burst.   However, none of this bursting applies to credit ratings agencies. 

       Credit ratings agencies are often wrong, have been wrong and will not, even under Dodd-Frank, need to be correct, much less try harder to do so, or for that matter make any effort towards attempting to.   All three credit ratings agencies adjusted their triple-A ratings of debt instruments to less than investment grade at virtually the same time the rest of the world figured out there was a problem with them.  In their defense, S&P points out that credit ratings are, "forward-looking opinions about credit risk. Standard & Poor's credit ratings express the agency's opinion about the ability and willingness of an issuer, such as a corporation or state or city government, to meet its financial obligations in full and on time." [2]  The problem is that by the time the credit ratings agencies, self-correct, their statements are no longer forward looking or even present looking but much more akin to being told how a movie ends a few months after you have seen it.

       Not that long ago, collateralized debt obligations were repackaged during the credit bubble into investment pools and other mortgage backed securities and collectively adorned with the gold standard of financial ratings, the coveted AAA ratings of the largest credit ratings agencies, Fitch, S&P and Moody's.   The credit ratings agencies gave their coveted and in theory elusive triple-A rating to investments that were anything but credit worthy or in the best case, possessed of a very mixed credit pedigree.  The agencies' bestowal of triple-A ratings to companies and investment vehicles that were junk and later discovered to be junk, caused losses in the billions and trillions of dollars to everyone who relied on their ratings--essentially everyone.

       The role of the credit ratings agencies, was present from Goldman Sachs' knowingly selling instruments it bet against in Abacus to Citigroup's selling of investments it also bet against-all these transactions of a seemingly knowing fraud were adorned with triple-A ratings.  Triple-A ratings played an essential role in the credit crisis- enough to make them arguably the largest "but-for" causal culprit of the financial crisis.  "But for" the credit ratings agencies bestowal of triple-A ratings on sub-prime debt investments, the credit crisis would not have occurred.   But the financial world does not operate as simply as the liability model used by personal injury lawyers to make someone pay for car accidents or anything resulting in a personal injury.  The financial world is incomparably more complex and the causes of the financial crisis are many.

       In a larger sense, the credit ratings agencies cannot help it.  The fault lies with their business model and that having no competition, they really can be wrong in the largest possible way and not be "wrong" in the conventional sense. 

       The big three credit ratings agencies are bestowed with a monopoly by the government and if the world did not like the big three credit ratings agencies, it would find (with the exception of a few marginal players) that it had precisely nowhere else to go.  Put another away, even after having the SEC accuse them of consumer fraud, and being about as wrong as they can be, the big three credit ratings agencies still rate 96% of the world's bonds.  Sort of as Henry Ford was reputed to have said about offering customers the choice of a new model T in "any color so long as its black."

       What is more, their business model makes the ratings agencies operate within a closed conflict of interest loop.  The credit ratings agencies are paid by the issuers (who are also their clients) of the securities they were supposed to evaluate-this creates a conflict of interest.

       But the government, or specifically the SEC knew of the conflicts of interest within the credit rating agency business model and approved of them.  In June 2007, the SEC acknowledged that there might be a real problem having the referee in a match being paid by one of the sides-not the investors or the public's side either.   The SEC asked S&P for documentation of how S&P handled conflicts of interests and after several months of scrutiny, approved of S&P as a NSRO--again, after having vetted the inherent conflicts of interest within S&P's business model. 

       The ratings agencies have lobbying power in Washington and every interest in protecting their triopoly, which remains, even after the Credit Crisis and the implementation of Dodd-Frank, wholly unscathed.  But really, in the absence of any alternative and near total dependency, the world has an interest in S&P too.

       The most persuasive mitigating factor against charging the S&P or any of the credit ratings agencies with fraud is that they themselves relied on the internal audit committees of their clients/issuers.  The credit ratings agencies relied on the audit committees of their issuer clients, which committees had signed off and attested to the S&P and the other credit ratings agencies about the value and risk profiles of the investments for which they sought ratings.  Ultimately, unless corporate boards are compromised of crony Chia pets distinctly and wholly incapable of bearing any liability or culpability (a very real possibility upon even a cursory scrutiny- and another discussion for another time), they ought to bear the responsibility for misleading the credit ratings agencies, or simply not knowing what they were doing.

       Either the investment banks' audit committees were not qualified to pass on these investments or the credit ratings agencies were not.  What now seems obvious is that both the credit ratings agencies and the audit committees were not sophisticated enough to understand the investment products they were charged with scrutinizing.  They approved of them anyway.  

       The credit ratings agencies could not give accurate ratings of many of the instruments involved in the housing bubble and credit crisis because of the complexity of the transactions involved and their inability to understand what they were analyzing.  Not knowing what they were doing makes them at least guilty, if they were regular market participants, (which they are not) of criminal fraud.   They may have culpability because they perpetuated a fraud on the marketplace by accepting money and using their position of trust, as a government sanctioned arbiter or investments, to pretend to pass on investments when in reality they did not know what they were examining or did and had a financial incentive to lie.  One thing is certain, were the credit ratings agencies like any number of the two-bit individuals the Department of Justice and SEC have prosecuted, one could say that the prosecution of fraud is not disproportionately tilted towards the smallest financial participants, or at least squarely away from the largest ones.

       In theory, the credit ratings agencies exist to level asymmetries of information.  They are also supposed to evaluate risk.   Unfortunately, the credit ratings agencies have conflicts of interests and they evaluate financial products (like collateralized debt obligations) that they do not understand.  They were far from alone in not understanding the debt instruments presented to them.  In 2007, even Ben Bernanke thought the risk of sub-prime debt was contained.  The ratings agencies, like most of Wall Street during financial crises seemed to lack fixed ways to measure absolute risk, and as a result during financial crises, when you would most want risk models to work, they too prove catastrophically wrong.  Moreover, as much as Wall Street was wrong in assessing its risk, so was the government and many of Wall Street's largest institutions-so why merely pick on S&P?  Unlike all of the players on Wall Street however, the credit ratings agencies are still the only game in town.  The Department of Justice's civil suit will do nothing to change this.@

R Tamara de Silva

Chicago, Illinois

A Tale of Two Classes of Defendant and Lanny Breuer

By R Tamara de Silva

January 28, 2013

"swaying power such as has never in the world's history been trusted in the hands of mere private citizens,...after having created a system of quiet but irresistible corruption-will ultimately succeed in directing government itself.  Under the American form of society, there is now no authority capable of effective resistance." 

Henry Adams writing about the corruption of the Erie Railroad for the Westminster Review in 1870, he described corporate influence growing to the point of being uncheckable with political parties that would sacrifice principle for accommodation.

       Last week, the Head of the Department of Justice's Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, announced his resignation.  His resignation is remarkable only in so far that it draws attention to the enormity of what he would not do.  Under Breuer's watch, leaving aside some high profile and related insider trading prosecutions, not one senior Wall Street executive was prosecuted or even charged (by some accounts- not even investigated) with anything having to do with the worst financial crisis in American history-a crisis that resulted in a bailout of Wall Street banks and the financial sector at a cost to American taxpayers of between $43.32-$59.75 billion.[1]  A day before Lanny Breuer's resignation, PBS' Frontline aired an investigation about the failure of the Justice Department to prosecute a single senior banker involved in the mortgage crisis called, "The Untouchables."  During this same time that the Department of Justice refused to go after a single head of a Wall Street firm, they took a particularly hard line on a torture whistleblower (not the torturers), and many financial criminals responsible for not the billions caused by elite Wall Street firms but between thousands to hundreds of thousands like elderly couples for possible pension fraud, an appraiser in Florida, individuals who committed bank fraud by lying on mortgage applications and other criminals like pot smokers and Aaron Swartz.  It is not that I condone wrong-doing, only a record of selective prosecution on steroids.  Lanny Breuer's Justice Department exposed its full fury to the chubs of the criminal justice systems while systematically saving the titans and whales.

Prosecutorial Discretion and Sympathy for the Titan

       One of the reasons, Lanny Breuer gave for the non-prosecution of a senior Wall Street executive is sympathy for employees and shareholders.  In his interview with Martin Smith of Frontline, Mr. Breuer repeated a specific if selective, empathy, wholly at odds with the charge he had been given by Senator Kaufman to investigate and hold to account all those responsible for the financial crisis.[2]   This selective empathy is also wholly at odds with the unbiased way in which most of us naively think justice is administered and prosecutions are sought.  By the way, after this interview aired, Martin Smith states that he was called by the Justice Department and told that they would never cooperate with PBS again.[3] 

       In September of last year, Mr. Breuer admitted his particular empathy towards the plight of the largest of Wall Street banks when he addressed the New York Bar Association and said,

In my conference room, over the years, I have heard sober predictions that a company or bank might fail if we indict, that innocent employees could lose their jobs, that entire industries may be affected, and even that global markets will feel the effects.  Sometimes - though, let me stress, not always - these presentations are compelling.  In reaching every charging decision, we must take into account the effect of an indictment on innocent employees and shareholders, just as we must take into account the nature of the crimes committed and the pervasiveness of the misconduct.  I personally feel that it's my duty to consider whether individual employees with no responsibility for, or knowledge of, misconduct committed by others in the same company are going to lose their livelihood if we indict the corporation.  In large multi-national companies, the jobs of tens of thousands of employees can be at stake.  And, in some cases, the health of an industry or the markets are a real factor.  Those are the kinds of considerations in white collar crime cases that literally keep me up at night, and which must play a role in responsible enforcement. 

When the only tool we had to use in cases of corporate misconduct was a criminal indictment, prosecutors sometimes had to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut.[4]

       It is odd that this same Justice Department did not take sympathy into account in demanding that Aaron Swartz serve 35 years or for that matter, the plight of all smaller defendants.  The omnibus catchall Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") could make criminals of many of us because it seeks to criminalize the use of a computer without authorization but no where defines what "authorization" means. 

       When the government freezes a defendant's assets or seizes property even before a filing of charges making it impossible for them to pay for a decent lawyer (assuming they can even afford one), does it really care how the defendant (before being proven guilty) manages to eat or live in the interim of years it can take from investigation to sentencing? 

       Where was the sympathy for Senator Ted Stevens?  Was it anything but a sheer lack of empathy that led to the career-ending prosecution of a six term Senator and the deliberate withholding of exculpatory evidence in his case?  What about the many cases where defendants are exonerated by physical evidence that the prosecution possessed but did not reveal at the time?  Where is the sympathy for the years or decades of a life that are lost because exculpatory evidence is not released or DNA evidence kits are not processed?  Or is the empathy that Lanny Breuer refers to, as selectively held as its application under Lanny Breuer's tenor suggests?

Conflicts of Money

       Money influences prosecutions.  Consider the tale of two men performing the identical act in the criminal law Jon Corzine and Russell Wasenfdorf, Sr.  Corzine was one of President Obama's elite bundlers in 2011 and 2012.  He campaigned heavily for the President as governor of New Jersey, and held private fundraisers for President Obama in his home even after MF Global went bankrupt and $1.6 billion of customer funds went missing in October 2011.  The Justice Department announced that they would not prosecute him.

       It was discovered in June 2012 that Peregrine Financial Group CEO, Russell Wasendorf Sr., like Corzine at MF Global, had tapped into customer segregated funds to the tune of $215 million.  Russell Wasendorf Sr was arrested and criminally charged later same that month.   Same act-missing customer funds that were by law not to touched-but a far disparate prosecution.[5] 

       Under Lanny Breuer, the Justice Department announced it would not go after Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs' employees were the second largest single contributor to President Obama in 2008 contributing $1,013,091.[6] Goldman Sachs is also one of the largest clients of Mr. Eric Holder's lawyer firm Covington & Burling.

       Speaking of Covington & Burling, Lanny Breuer worked at Covington along with Attorney General Eric Holder.  Their firm's largest clients were many of the Wall Street banks that were involved in the securitization of mortgage debt that contributed to the financial crisis.

       According to Reuters, Attorney General Holder and Lanny Breuer were expected to recuse themselves (a functional impossibility) under federal conflict of interest laws from Department of Justice decisions related to many of Wall Street's largest banks.  Of course they have not admitted to doing so in any instance of which I am aware.[7] 

Abacus and Such

       Goldman's Abacus scheme would fit into the most selective definitions of fraud. Goldman invented Abacus, according to an SEC civil complaint and an investor, to fail so that one of its largest hedge fund clients, Paulson & Co, could short it.[8]  In the meantime, Goldman sold Abacus bonds to many other investors all the while allowing Goldman to take in large investment banking fees from the sale and from the purchase. The problem is, the investors were not aware that Goldman's largest hedge fund client along with Goldman Sachs was betting against them and that as such Goldman Sachs may have a conflict of interest in designing what went into Abacus.  Goldman claimed that somewhere within all the disclosure statements was a reference to all this.   The Department of Justice announced it would not seek any criminal fraud charges against Goldman.  Goldman Sachs settled the civil suit for $550 million, which is not a lot for a company that earns billions of dollars per quarter.

       On November 28, 2011, Judge Jed S. Rakoff rejected what would have been the sixth civil settlement agreement between Citigroup Global Markets Inc. and the SEC since 2003 for $285 million.  Citigroup had sold $1 billion in mortgage-bonds through a vehicle called Class V Funding III, without disclosing that it was betting against $500 million of those assets-in essence offering something to its customers and not disclosing that it would be betting against its customers.  The Department of Justice was not about to seek criminal fraud charges against Citigroup either.

       Civil settlements between the SEC and other parties are alternatively called consent decrees and they are a far cry from criminal prosecution. Nor do they deter misconduct because no admission of wrong-doing is required and the fines are pin money to the banks. 

       It is in the public's interest to prevent fraud upon the market and to prevent the type of financial engineering solely for the sake of fees that can lead to catastrophic losses ultimately borne by society as a whole.  The type of hyperleveraged machinations, not understood by the banks themselves that wind up privatizing profit and publicizing loss. The problem with selective prosecution of financial crime or any crime, is that it undermines the very idea of justice, whose force and majesty lie in its fair and unbiased application.  When the Executive branch's justice department seeks fines from banks which fees are so small as to be written off as a rational and good cost of doing business, while simultaneously pursuing prosecutions against smaller parties and the comparatively disenfranchised, it is no longer dealing out justice.  It is selectively doling out punishments to those not in its favor.@

R. Tamara de Silva

Last Thursday December 15, 2011 was MF Global Holdings Ltd.'s and MF Global Inc.'s Chief Executive Jon Corzine's third time to testify before Congress. He may not have faired all that well in light of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group Chairman Terrance Duffy's testimony on December 13, 2011, which seemed to contradict Corzine's previous testimony. Corzine adjusted his testimony on December 15, 2011 to account for the seeming contradiction. However, how well Corzine may have done to avoid perjury or any role in a possible fraud remains to be seen. A closer examination of Corzine's testimony and the events leading up to MF Global's bankruptcy on October 31, 2011 suggests problems. If there is any purpose to be achieved in having Corzine testify again, lawmakers should focus their questions towards the failed purchase of MF Global by Interactive Brokers and all customer agreements, including emails between MF Global and account holders leading up to the purported transfers of $175 million and $700 million in as yet missing customer segregated funds and the firm's use of a type of repurchase agreement.

Were the Transfers Legal?

In my first article on MF Global, I suggested that the $1.2 billion missing from customer segregated funds may have been incurred due to over-leveraged positions in European sovereign debt that coincidentally took a dramatic turn for the worse (as they did in fact as yield curves doubled rapidly in some issues) during the last weeks of October, and that funds were transferred to cover margin in customer funds held in European debt. In this scenario, as I suggested, nothing illegal would have occurred because CFTC Rule 1.25 had been amended to permit the investment of customer segregated funds in foreign sovereign debt.

Moreover, if the money was transferred legally and without any fraud, but simply lost in the market, there may not be any right to recover the money by MF Global's customers in bankruptcy proceedings. The use of customer segregated funds for margin payments on repo-to-maturity ("RTM") transactions are not illegal and hence unlikely, without anything else, to be recoverable in bankruptcy.

An alternate illegal scenario is that MF Global may have engaged in some late stage embezzlement of customer funds that were supposed to be segregated from MF Global's accounts and never commingled with any other funds. [1] One way this may have occurred is if the funds were transferred out of customer segregated funds for a legal purpose but without the customers' meaningful consent or, more likely, with an intent to deceive the customer.

MF Global was permitted to invest customer funds, and borrow customer funds so long as the dollar value of the funds taken from the customer segregated accounts remained the same-the accounts were kept intact. For example, if MF Global used customer funds by transferring a specific amount of money out of customer segregated accounts; it was required to simultaneously deposit something of equal value in these accounts to equal the dollar value of what had been taken out.

If MF Global transferred customer funds out of segregated accounts as a loan to MF Global to cover margin calls in existing positions in sovereign debt, (perfectly legal) [2], it may however, be fraud and intent to deceive on its part if MF Global knew it could not repay the money. This fraud may have occurred if MF Global knew (and it would be interesting to argue how it did not) that it sought to legally borrow from customer funds, knowing that it was de facto insolvent and could not replace the money.

In other words, an acceptable use of customer segregated funds for margin payments may not exist if at the time MF Global made the transfers, it was insolvent or in the midst of a crisis where insolvency was around the corner to be seen. Even if MF Global asked for and obtained the consent of its of customers, or consent was not required according to customer agreements, and it legally borrowed the money from customers by replacing it with other collateral (collateral such as commercial paper, as permitted by CFTC Rule 1.25), the transfers would still be illegal because MF Global would be deceiving its customers-knowing it was already insolvent. Even though the rules likely permitted the replacement of funds with other collateral (and the collateral was used) MF Global's actions are arguably illegal because they were deceiving their customers knowing they would not be able to make the customers whole. Meaningful deception like this would be fraud and embezzlement in which case, the funds could be clawed back in bankruptcy proceedings-Please note that I am speculating a bit in specific statements about bankruptcy proceedings and do not specialize in this area of law.

Changing testimony or selective recall?

On December 8, 2011, Corzine testified before the House Agriculture Committee that he had "no idea where the money is" and that "I know I had no intention to ever authorize the transfer of segregated moneys. I know what my intentions were."

On December 13, 2011, Corzine testified that, "I never directed anyone at MF Global to misuse customer funds. I never intended to. And, as far as I am concerned, I never gave instructions that anybody could misconstrue."

On December 13, 2011 Terrance Duffy testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee. In Mr. Duffy's testimony he said that the CME has been conducting their own ongoing investigation of MF Global and discovered on December 10, 2011, after questioning a former MF Global employee who knew about the transfer of $175 of customer funds towards MF Global's broker dealer operations, that Corzine knew all about the transfers and likely authorized them.

On Thursday November 15, 2011 Corzine repeated that he did not authorize any illegal transfers, pointing to his General Counsel and Treasurer as the people who would know about the transfers. However, he was able to recall the $175 million transfer enough to tell the Committee that Duffy likely meant a loan advance from customer segregated funds to MF Global's European operations. Remember that all his previous testimony was to the effect that he, "was totally stunned to learn customer money was missing...did not learn about it until October 30, 2011...etc"- in this context it seems a tad odd for him to suddenly develop a very specific recall about one event of October 28, 2011. Sadly, this was wholly lost on the Committee, which asked not one follow-up question.

In addition to Mr. Duffy's testimony that a MF Global back office employee said Corzine was aware of the transfers, the Committee alluded to evidence that the Chief Financial Officer of MF Global's North American operations (presumably Christine Serwinski) said that Corzine knew about the transfers. If so, there are at least two or more MF Global employees and officers who contradict Corzine's sworn Sgt. Shultz testimony.

Not being perfectly honest with FINRA

On December 8, 2011, Steve Luparello, the Vice Chairman of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") also testified before the House Committee on Agriculture about MF Global's collapse. According to Mr. Luparello, MF Global was not completely candid with the Chicago Board of Options Exchange ("CBOE") and FINRA. In late September 2010, MF Global assured both regulatory bodies that it did not have any positions in European sovereign debt.[3] MF Global did in fact have positions in European sovereign debt during this time but because according to GAAP accounting rules, positions held in RTMs are treated as sales and not liabilities, MF Global did not violate the law in hiding its credit and risk exposure to RTM, which are liabilities in the real, non-accounting world. Technically, MF Global was able to get away with it, at least for a time.

A little background may be helpful and a story of another failed firm, Lehman Brothers that generously indulged in a cousin of RTMs, the Repo 105. The Repo 105 was utilized by Lehman Brothers, among other firms that did not survive the last financial crisis including Washington Mutual, Northern Rock and some that did like Citigroup.

This is how it worked and how a liability (a loan) can be transformed into a revenue-generating event (a sale)...if you are an investment bank that is. Lehman entered into repo transactions with offshore banks. Lehman would sell (though actually a loan) a bundle of toxic assets such as sub-prime mortgages and dubiously collateralized debt obligations to the bank. This transaction is characterized on the books of Lehman as a sale. Lehman agrees to buy back or repurchase (hence the term 'repo') the toxic assets at a later date (maturity). In this way, Lehman moves loans and bad assets off its balance sheets towards the end of each financial quarter-removing liabilities dramatically improves a balance sheet- as if they do not exist. Then Lehman reports the sale as a revenue-generating event, in effect moving by way of example, $39 billion off its balance sheet in what is a liability, and reporting it as a sale of $39 billion. It is fraudulent twice over in that Lehman does not disclose on its financials that it has an obligation (a debt to buy back) to pay back the amount loan and it reports the loan as revenue.

In effect, this is what MF Global did with FINRA and CBOE. However, the regulators caught MF Global's exposure to European sovereign debt and told MF Global to keep substantially more money in reserves because of what FINRA identified in May 2011 as a $7.6 billion risk exposure. MF Global appealed to the SEC and because of the appeal process, it was only in August that FINRA and the CBOE were successful in getting MF Global to put up more money for its European debt exposure and utilization of RTMs.

An accounting error

Also on December 15, 2011, the oversight panel of the House Financial Services Committee released a CME Group document the CME had given to the government containing a detailed log of its dealings with MF Global between October 24, 2011 and October 31, 2011. According to this document, Christine Serwinski, the Chief Financial Officer for North America at MF Global, and its Assistant Treasurer, Edith O'Brien, told a Mike Procajlo, an exchange auditor at 1:00 a.m. on Oct. 31, 2011 that the customer money was transferred on Oct. 27 and Oct. 28 and possibly Oct. 26, 2011. "About $700 million was moved to the broker-dealer side of the business to meet liquidity issues in a series of transactions on Thursday, Friday and possibly Wednesday," Serwinski told Procajlo about eight hours before the firm filed for the eighth-largest bankruptcy in United States history.

Barely three days prior, on October 28, 2011, MF Global had submitted a statement to the CME showing that it had $200,178,912 in excess cash in its customer segregated funds as of the close of October 27, 2011.

On October 30, 2011, an official from the CFTC informed Procajlo that a draft statement of the value of MF Global's customer segregated funds, showed a deficit in customer segregated funds for the day ending October 28, 2011. MF Global's Assistant Controller, Mike Bolan and its General Counsel, Laurie Ferber said they believe the customer-funds deficit is "an accounting error." Ms. Ferber had told the CME on October 25, 2011 that rumors about problems stemming from MG Global's European debt trading were not accurate.

On December 15, 2011 Mr. Duffy told the House Committee that this so called accounting error was "a telling sign that regulators were being kept in the dark" about MF Global's customer accounts. What was Corzine doing during all of this?

Acquisition by Interactive Brokers

While the exchange was trying to get to the bottom of the accounting error, whose magnitude would not be revealed until the evening of October 30, 2011 as being $900 million, Corzine and other MF Global officials were trying to close a deal to sell MF Global to Interactive Brokers Group, Inc. On that same day, October 30, 2011, MF Global issued a press release at 6:00 p.m. announcing that it had reached a deal with Interactive Brokers.

Corzine as CEO of MF Global negotiated the potential sale of his firm to Interactive Brokers. The first question involved in any sale of a going concern involves the determination of an acquisition price. Corzine would have had to know what the assets and liabilities of MF Global were (the balance sheets) to even begin to negotiate a price. The deal was happening at the exact same time of the transfers.

It is beyond the bounds of credibility to argue that MF Global did not have regular if not daily accounting of cash balance sheets and that Corzine did not see them. If Corzine knew what the company was worth, during the very days in which at least $900 million in customer segregated funds was lost, he must have at a minimum known about the company's impending insolvency. How then could he not have known of the transfers?

In addition, as a matter of course in the futures industry, MF Global likely had to report the total daily amounts carried in segregated funds to the CME-it certainly had to do so from October 24, 2011 onwards. This computation is performed as a matter of course every single day at every futures broker.

Corzine's testimony before Congress would have us believe that hundreds of millions of dollars were moved around without the knowledge or approval of the MF Global's CEO and CFO all while the balance sheets were being scrutinized for an acquisition by Interactive Brokers, which Corzine spear-headed.

Corzine has sworn under oath that he did not know anything about the missing money until October 30, 2011. This is simply not possible.

Suggestions for House and Senate Committees

Further education about the industry is in order. Both the House and Senate soft-peddled the issues, and perhaps unintentionally avoided important questions and asked almost no meaningful follow-up questions, allowing Corzine to stretch the bounds of credibility in evasiveness. Further questioning should focus, among other things, on the representations made by MF Global to Interactive Brokers on October 24, 2011-October 30, 2011.@
R. Tamara de Silva
Chicago, Illinois
December 19, 2011

R. Tamara de Silva is a securities lawyer and independent trader

Footnotes:
1. http://www.timelyobjections.com/john-corzine/
2. Remember CFTC Rule 1.25 which had been amended to allow the investment of customer segregated funds in foreign sovereign debt, was amended back after the fall of MF Global to disallow the investment of customer segregated funds in foreign sovereign debt.
3. http://www.finra.org/Newsroom/Speeches/Luparello/P125233