Posted on 12/09/2011 7:37:41 AM PST by SeekAndFind
I don’t know. Maybe he should have stuck with the Fifth Amendment:
Jon S. Corzine, the former U.S. senator and governor who presided over the collapse of the commodities brokerage MF Global, told lawmakers Thursday that he never intended to authorize a transfer of customer funds to the firm’s accounts and that if he did “it was a misunderstanding.”
Under pointed questioning by members of the House Committee on Agriculture, the New Jersey Democrat would not rule out the possibility that someone at the firm misinterpreted him as suggesting that the struggling firm tap into investors’ funds.
In his prepared testimony submitted before the hearing, Corzine said he could not explain what happened to “many hundreds of millions of dollars” that the firm was holding for customers. He said he was “stunned” to learn shortly before the firm sought bankruptcy protection at the end of October that MF Global could not account for the money.
“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date,” Corzine said, according to the testimony.
The firm was required to keep clients’ money separated from its own. But more than $1.2 billion might be missing, the trustee overseeing the firm’s liquidation said last month. An attorney for the trustee confirms that assessment in testimony submitted for for hearing.
Well, what could Corzine have said that would have contributed to a potential “misunderstanding”? “Gee, guys, wouldn’t it be great if we had another billion or so dollars we could tap to back up our play on Euro debt”? Or maybe,”Do you think anyone would notice if a billion or so in customer assets went missing”? This is the kind of statement that a competent cross-examiner would seize in an effort to drill into Corzine’s testimony.
This gets to the heart of the puzzling easy ride that Corzine has received from the media thus far. Thanks to the public outrage over the Enron fraud (and MCI and others as well), Congress passed the clumsy and costly Sarbanes-Oxley regulations that presumes that CEOs know about all of the fiscal moves a company makes. Corzine’s statement that “Other questions, given my specific role in the company, will be questions for which I have no personal knowledge,” would be rejected entirely in any other context. So far, the media has treated Corzine as more of a victim of circumstance than a man who ran an enterprise that absconded with $1.2 billion of his customer’s assets.
Give the Washington Post credit for mentioning that Corzine is a Democrat and a fundraiser for Barack Obama, two points that often get neglected in other reports. However, they resist connecting the dots as much as possible. For instance, they report on Corzine’s assertion that his lobbying against tougher enforcement that would have caught MF Global’s fraud did not amount to “undue influence”:
In his prepared testimony, Corzine also recounted that he lobbied against regulators’ effort to tighten restrictions on how brokerages such as MF Global could invest clients’ money.
The proposed rules change was championed by Gary Gensler, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and a fellow alum of Goldman Sachs. Corzine said he argued against the change in a July conference call with Gensler. Gensler has recused himself from the agency’s probe of MF Global.
At the hearing, Corzine told lawmakers that he “did not exert undue or improper influence on regulators.”
However, with the exception of a single reference to Corzine as a New Jersey Democrat, there isn’t anything preceding this in the article which puts Corzine’s influence in the administration in any context at all — and nothing appears for eleven more paragraphs:
He used the personal fortune he built at Goldman to fuel his ascent to the U.S. Senate, where he served on the Banking Committee. He later won the New Jersey governorship. In 2007, he was badly injured in a car crash.
He ran for reelection as governor of New Jersey in 2009 but was defeated by Republican Chris Christie. As Corzine receded from the public eye, Christie gained national prominence and recently considered jumping into the presidential race.
At MF Global, Corzine was returning to his Wall Street roots. The job could have served as a step toward a political comeback. As recently as last spring, he hosted a fundraiser for President Obama.
Er, yeah — and as recently as this summer, Obama made Corzine his liaison between Wall Street and his re-election campaign. That’s the context in which Corzine’s pushback against the regulators took place, a fact that Washington Post readers won’t know unless they read about it somewhere else.
It’s not quite “name that party,” but it’s close.
We are so far down the rabbit hole it isn’t even funny. Every day gets more surreal than the previous one.
"And I promise to never do it again... if I did it.. which I might have.. or not."
What he said was “ go find some cash somewhere!!”
Dieing companies have no scruples.
All of Corzine’s money should be locked up until this is over with. He still hasn’t answered whether he lost any of his fortune.
As I understand the intent of Sarbanes–Oxley is to bind the CEO, legally and potentially criminally, to the honesty of its bookkeeping. MF Global’s books were fraudulent. Why hasn’t he been charged already?
You run a $100 million dollar company and do the same thing and you’d be in jail so fast you wouldn’t have time to blink.
To me this is easy - tell the lieutenants to give up the goods on Corzine or they go to jail. Can’t believe they’d be that hard to flip. You know Corzine ordered it.
Imagine a six-year-old telling his mommy, “I didn’t tell my friends to take your money, and if I did I didn’t mean it.” WTH is going on with the scandals and this administration? Corzine and Holder are both making the most asinine of excuses that wouldn’t hold up for a half-minute in traffic court. The stakes at their level are way too high to allow this type of illegal activity. The money Corzine was in charge of is gone. That’s called theft. He was in charge. How hard is that to figure out? Does anybody in any position of authority have a spine any more?
I didn’t do it... you can’t prove it... nobody saw anything. (But if someone did, I didn’t mean it).
If I were king, he’d go to jail for saying something so stupid.
if he did, he didn’t mean it
I see a group hug in there somewhere
“Ididn’tdoitnobodysawmeyoucan’tproveanything!”
- Bart Simpson.
Nor do dying nations.
I watched the hearing yesterday and for the most part the Congress members asked Corzine a bunch of softball questions.
I want to know when Corzine and the other executives at MF Global are going to be prosecuted for theft.
Some major prison time for these crooks would do a lot to clean up wall street.
No.
So which is it?
He didn’t do it or he did do it?
Is this a responsible statement from a man who was a Senator and a state governor before he bilked MF Global investors out of $1.2 billion?
The fact that maggots like him can get voted into such high level government offices provides some insight as to why the country is in such horrible financial condition.
By all accounts, as governor of New Jersey he ran the state pretty much the same way he ran MF Global.
IMHO, this is a major problem. These crooks just keep on getting away with crimes like this. Over and over and over and over. And NO jail time.
We will remind the voters that THIS was Obama’s choice for the new Sec. of Treasury.
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