Free Republic

How to fight 21st century financial crime with 19th century tools A US House of Representatives committee is investigating whether federal securities regulators are using last century's tools to review corporations' books. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa penned a stiff missive to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White asking for an explanation of why the regulator has been so slow to embrace the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL. White has been wanting more funds to hire additional staff but apparently is less interested in moving to XBRL. Issa pointed out that interactive data in financial...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a lawsuit against Bank of American over the BOAMS 2008-A securitization of a pool of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs). Here is the complaint filed by the SEC. The theme of the complaint is “fraud.” Let’s take a look inside the deal. Here is the prospectus supplement for BOAMS 2008-A dated January 25, 2008. The BOAMS 2008-A was a senior-subordinated, structured finance securitization. boams2008atr The pool of mortgage underlying BOAMS 2008-A were mostly from California, 100% were ARMs originated or refinanced in 2007, boams2008acollatcomp 83.1% of the loans had borrowers with FICO scores of...

Company with ties to Terry McAuliffe is under SEC investigation By Tom Hamburger and Ben Pershing, Friday, August 2, 12:32 PM E-mail the writers An electric-car company co-founded by Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe (D) is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission over its conduct in soliciting foreign investors, according to law-enforcement documents and company officials. The SEC subpoenaed documents in May from GreenTech Automotive and bank records from a sister company, Gulf Coast Funds Management of McLean. The investigation is focused, at least in part, on alleged claims that the company “guarantees returns” to the investors, according...

A serious data breach at the Securities and Exchange Commission transferred personal data about current and former employees into the computer system of another federal agency, a letter sent by the SEC to staff reveals.The July 8 letter, obtained by The Hill, is from Thomas Bayer, the SEC’s chief information officer and senior agency official on privacy. It warned that personal employee data had been discovered on the networks of another, unnamed federal agency.It said a former SEC employee “inadvertently and unknowingly” downloaded the names, birthdates and Social Security numbers of employees onto a thumb drive, and then transferred them...

"Failure to Supervise" is the charge in the civil action being leveled by the SEC against legendary hedge fund manager Steve Cohen. This story has been running ad nauseum on CNBC since Friday afternoon. There is little information to go on but my conjecture is that this is another agency being directly used and abused by the Obama Administration to accomplish greater control over anything financial. Based up the well established pattern, his finger prints can be found anywhere intimidation is being exerted by government agencies. The default assumption with this President should be that every federal agency is being...

The Securities and Exchange Commission accused Miami and its former budget director of securities fraud related to several municipal bond offerings. The city and Michael Boudreaux made materially false and misleading statements and omissions about interfund transfers in three 2009 bond offerings totaling $153.5 million, the SEC said in a statement Friday. Boudreaux orchestrated the transfers to mask growing deficits in the city’s general fund, the SEC said. The SEC in 2010 started cracking down on state and local governments for not providing investors in the municipal bond market with accurate information about pension liabilities. Since then, Illinois and New...

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made –Groucho Marx I suspect the SEC, FINRA, and CFTC are big fans of Groucho Marx, or at least his observations on fair dealing. How else could they justify turning a blind eye to a global media powerhouse such as Reuters selling early access to market-moving information? How could these authorities not condemn a practice like high-frequency trading (HFT), which causes significant market disruptions on a daily basis and destroys investor confidence? Why would agencies that are charged with oversight of the most...

Verizon, the phone company whose disclosure of customer data to the federal government is at the center of the furor over cooperation by technology companies with top-secret national security programs, has offered a precise, clear, but little-noticed public explanation of why it did what it did. The Verizon explanation is not in the vague and cryptic memo the company issued last week after the Guardian exposed its program. It came, instead, in the company’s annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, included in Verizon’s annual report to shareholders.

A resolution calling for the boycott of Israeli firms will not be put to a vote at TIAA-CREF’s upcoming shareholders meeting. The move comes after the pension fund giant received approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to “take no action” on a submission by pro-Palestinian activists. This followed the company’s warning by an Israeli civil rights group that passage of the resolution would violate NY and Federal law. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center, stressed that the development was “a major defeat for the extremist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement taking aim at Israel.”...

Wall Street investors hungry for advance information on upcoming federal health-care decisions repeatedly held private discussions with Obama administration officials, including a top White House adviser helping to implement the Affordable Care Act. The private conversations show that the increasingly urgent race to acquire“political intelligence” goes beyond the communications with congressional staffers that have become the focus of heightened scrutiny in recent weeks. White House records show that Elizabeth Fowler, then a top ­health-policy adviser to President Obama, met with executives from half a dozen investment firms in 2011 and 2012. Among them was Kris Jenner, a stock picker with...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The Senate on Monday unanimously approved Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney who supervised the prosecution of New York mob boss John Gotti, to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York judge has approved Bank of America's $2.43 billion settlement of a class action lawsuit brought by shareholders over the company's acquisition of former competitor Merrill Lynch. A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Manhattan approved the settlement Friday. The bank proposed the settlement in late September. The agreement resolves allegations that Bank of America did not disclose the state of its finances or those of Merrill Lynch when it agreed to buy Merrill in September 2008. Judge Kevin Castel said the settlement was "hard fought," but called the...

Multinational retail giant Walmart has said that the company is expected to incur financial losses in view of ongoing investigation into alleged corruption cases pertaining to its foreign subsidiaries. “...We expect to continue to incur costs (in addition to the $157 million of costs incurred in fiscal 2013) in conducting our on-going review and investigations”, the company said in a filing to US Securities and Exchange Commission. The company claimed that Audit Committee comprising its independent directors (on board) is conducting an internal investigation into, among other things, alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practises Act (“FCPA”) and other alleged...

Two weeks ago, a unanimous Supreme Court rebuffed the Securities and Exchange Commission Gabelli v. SEC. The SEC maintained that its enforcement actions for fines under the Investment Advisers Act weren't subject to the five-year statute of limitations. This wasn't the first time the courts have pushed back a federal agency for overreaching. It won't be the last. But the SEC's audacity prompts a broader policy question: What good is accomplished by imposing monetary penalties on corporations, as the agency attempted to do in Gabelli? The answer is that when such penalties are sought by the government, they probably do...

For the second time in history, federal regulators have accused an American state of securities fraud, finding that Illinois misled investors about the condition of its public pension system from 2005 to 2009. In announcing a settlement with the state on Monday, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Illinois of claiming that it had been properly funding public workers’ retirement plans when it had not. In particular, it cited the period from 2005 to 2009, when Illinois also issued $2.2 billion in bonds. The growing hole in the state pension system put increasing pressure on Illinois’ own finances during that...

<p>The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has frozen the assets of a Swiss trading account that allegedly made a series of "highly suspicious" trades reaping about $1.7 million ahead of the blockbuster sale of H.J. Heinz Co.</p> <p>The regulator's move came one day after Heinz said it was selling itself for $23 billion to Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Brazilian private-equity firm 3G Capital in one of the biggest food-industry acquisitions ever.</p>

Goldman Sachs Group Inc is cooperating with a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission probe into insider options trading in H.J. Heinz Co before the food company announced it was being acquired, Goldman said on Friday.

Choice of Mary Jo White to Head SEC Puts Fox In Charge of Hen House POSTED: January 25, 9:00 AM ET Mary Jo White I was shocked when I heard that Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney and a partner for the white-shoe Wall Street defense firm Debevoise and Plimpton, had been named the new head of the SEC. I thought to myself: Couldn't they have found someone who wasn't a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn't they have found someone who isn't a perfect...

SEC names new top lawyer By Bernie Becker - 01/07/13 01:12 PM ET The Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday that Geoffrey Aronow would take over as its general counsel. Aronow, a lawyer in the Washington office of Bingham McCutcheon, has previous government experience, having served as head of the enforcement division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The SEC's new top lawyer also has counseled clients about issues before the commission and the CFTC, and becomes one of the first top appointments from the SEC's new chairwoman, Elisse Walter. Aronow, for instance, represented the chief financial officer for MF...

Mary Jo White is a poor choice to head the SEC. As a U.S. attorney, she demonstrated a lack of political independence and competence. In the late 90's prosecution of the Teamsters money landering scandal, White won several guilty pleas from low-level has-beens, but gave a pass to prominent union figures who played a key role in the Democratic political campaign of 2000, and every one since. The magnitude of White's dereliction of duty can be seen in who was not prosecuted- Richard Trumka, Andrew Stern and Gerald McEntee. In the 1996 Teamster election, incumbent President Ron Carey narrowly defeated...