Scandals & scams
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Once again, Tom Vanderwell here with some thoughts about moral hazard....Barry Ritholz at The Big Picture had these two comics that brought to the forefront again the issue of moral hazard. Check out the comics and then we'll talk "on...
While there are a number of stories floating around about the topping out of the poker craze, my favorite current poker story is the one involving poker legend Doyle Brunson's bizarre $700mm bid for WPT (the World Poker Tour). After...
I posted a somewhat flip entry here a few days ago containing an entertaining attack by hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb on SFBC International, a CRO. Lest it seem I'm in any way minimizing how horrible the underlying story is,...
In a recent conference call with beleagured executives at contract research organization (CRO) SFBC International, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb of Third Point was gob-smackingly aggressive. The transcript follows, and I have put the two minute audio snippet here (in...
Japanese brokerage firm Mizuho made a $335mm trading error earlier this week, and the subsequent market melee was apparently caught on a camera phone....
Sportsbook.com shut off betting Friday on both Sports Illustrated's Sportsperson of the Year, and Time Magazine's Person of the Year. Why? Because it looked like the betting was tilting rapidly toward two candidates, quarterback Tom Brady and Mother Nature, respectively....
"Refund?! Refund? Refund?! Refund! Refund?" -- Breaking Away (1979) Having now read the Duke Cunningham plea agreement, there are many blackly comedic highlights, chief among which is the following excerpt:Oh, asking for a refund of $8,504 rather than paying taxes...
There is an updated SEC complaint out with respect to the alleged financial mismanagement of client accounts at former high-flying technology fund Amerindo. It is stupendously (accent on the "stupe" part) fascinating, if only because of the amazing apparent high-handedness...
The Financial Times gets a little closer to Lui Qibing, the man behind some bizarre trades roiling copper markets. While the Chinese government is painting him as a rogue trader, people close to him make a convincing case that there...
There is an interesting story out about the SEC charging a Estonian investment bank with front-running news on Business Wire. According to the SEC, two employees had their firm join Business Wire, then they used a "software spider" to obtain...
The WSJ is reporting tonight that a judge has scoldingly ruled against the SEC in its Reg FD case against Siebel Systems. (The software company had been accused of disclosing financial performance information to large institutional shareholders, but not disclosing...
Today’s WSJ has a great page one story on how some day traders profited from being able to listen in on a Merrill Lynch squawk box, and then front-run institutional orders. My favorite quote is this one: Traders used various...
I'm elevating the following from a comment to my earlier post about Rep. Randy Cunningham's apparent skill in choosing real estate agents: Another Senator with an amazing real estate agent."Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) made $822,000 last year from the sale...
Rep. Randy Cunningham apparently has the best real estate broker in California. He sold his Del Mar, California, house in November of 2003 for a tidy $1,675,000. A month later, however, the person who bought the house from Cunningham put...
I have written here a number of times in the last few days about Amerindo founder Alberto Vilar (and co-founder Gary Tanaka) being charged with playing fast and loose with investor money (and I don't mean by buying Taser shares)...
Sunday's N.Y. Times contains a must-read story on the underbelly of business: Taking companies public via reverse takeovers of shell companies. I can't tell you how many times I have had VC-frustrated entrepreneurs come to me with virtually the same...
Earlier this week the story made the rounds of the low-rent venture capital guy who allegedy duped Kodak. That story, while interesting in a tawdry sort of way, pales beside this one: Alberto Vilar, president and founder of Amerindo Investments,...
There is a fascinating survey in the current issue of CFO magazine wherein 300 chief financial officers rate their respective bosses' financial savvy. While CEOs are paying more attention these days, the results are still sobering. Almost one-in-five CFO respondents...
From Drudge:FLASH: Jane Fonda writes in new book that she caught Ted Turner having a 'nooner' with another woman a month after they were married. 'Ted is the only person I know who has had to apologize more than I...
Only in the topsy-turvy world of the brokerage industry could you get away with anything as loopy as so-called fairness opinions. For non-escapees of the industry, the illogic is this: i-bankers are paid somewhere between tens of thousands of dollars...
In a species of high-water mark for financial blogging, the first blogger of whom I am aware was arrested yesterday on charges that he had failed to disclose that "he received more than $1 million in cash and stock from...
There is apparently some juicy stuff in the new book "Blood on the Streets" by Newsweek writer Charles Gasparino. According to a Newsweek press release, the book "details the rise and fall of three high-profile Wall Street analysts -- Merrill...
Here is some venture capital reading from the Hollinger special report. This time it is Richard Perle -- yes, that Richard Perle -- who comes in for special treatment. The issue? Perle's role as a Hollinger board member, but in...
I haven't read all the way through the report of the special committee of the Hollinger board of directors into "allegations of fiduciary duty violations and other misconduct". I have, however, read enough to get an entertaining sense of the...
The FT had lunch with ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay this week. It is interesting, if mostly because Lay is learning how to humanize himself. Lay is, dare I say it, verging on verging on verging on being sympathetic: Towards the...
Frank Portnoy asks in today's Financial Times why more female financiers aren't out there causing trouble like their male counterparts: "During the past decade, women have held 20 to 40 per cent of positions on Wall Street, but all the...
Some day I'll post about my own brush with (Henry) Blodget, but for now I'll just clip the entertaining bits from a Business Week piece on Henry's new market research firm, Cherry Hill Research. As part of his SEC settlement...
While I've long agitated against the 10-14 month sentence about to be accorded to home decorating doyenne Martha Stewart, good news has arrived. According to this story in today's Toronto Globe & Mail, her sentence has been commuted to a...
From the trial transcript of private equity kingpin Teddy Forstmann in New York on the XO Communications mess: "What is a junk bond?" a lawyer inquired. "You're really asking the wrong person," Mr. Forstmann replied. When you can snatch the...
Eliot Spitzer's summons of Dick Grasso is here. Noteworthy in all of this is the heated rhetoric being deployed by Mssr. Spitzer. He has called Dick Grasso's compensation process "rigged", among other such things. The specific allegations are these: The...
During a recent hearing a pension consultant compared the disastrous situation faced by beneficiaries of the City of San Diego's pension fund with that of Enron's employees. It may not be quite that bad, but there is a $1.1-billion gap...
There are few things more vexing than missing an obvious and easy "get". I spoke on various media outlets this week about Nortel Networks' continuing troubles, and I didn't check into something that I should have: How many boards does...
Not to to turn this into "all golf, all the time", but I was tickled to read tonight that the prestigious Torrey Pines Golf Course here in La Jolla, California, is being audited for how it handles green fees. More and...
Enron's Jeff Skilling is apparently a fan of the Vincent "Pajama King" Gigante school of legal defense. The former Enron CEO was taken to a New York hospital early today after trying out some Gigante-style tactics: Skilling was at two...
Alex Prud'homme's excellent new book about Sam Waksal (of ImClone and Martha Stewart infamy) is full of pithy and fascinating stuff. While Martha gets all the headlines, Sam is a much more interesting figure -- and in many ways, a...
From an article in today's WSJ on the pending mistrial declaration in the fraud trial of Tyco exec, Dennis Kozlowski: In a highly unusual move, a juror in the trial appeared to make an "OK" gesture in the direction of...
Oh, the icongruity of it all. Home-decorating doyenne Martha Stewart could be the first person to go to jail having just won both an Emmy and a National Magazine Award for Excellence....
There is a crisis in crisis management at public companies. From Nortel Networks to Martha Stewart, CEOs are making bad situations worse by breaking the three rules of managing a crisis: Tell it all Tell it early Tell it yourself ...
One delicious irony in Friday's decision against Martha Stewart is how MSO stock behaved in the period leading up to the announcement. The guilty verdict crossed the wires at 15:08:09, but not before MSO stock was up almost 18% in...
Back from my recent trip, and found the changing text at Martha Stewart's website interesting. Here is what the first sentence was today shortly after the jury came in with its "guilty" verdict: I am obviously distressed by the jury's...
Yesterday's Delaware court decision against Conrad Black came with a comment from the judge in the Hollinger case that he found Black's testimony "evasive and unreliable". What was he talking about? Consider the following snippet. In it we have Martin...
Life -- or at least the Martha Stewart trial -- is imitating a typographic CSI. There have been duelling prosecution and defense ink experts on the stand, both trying to prove whether Ms. Stewart's broker wrote the "@60" mark (i.e.,...
What do you call it when a very large advertiser hands out advertising contracts largely to cronies and pays no interest to the results? Well, that is what apparently happened in Canada over the last few years. The report comes...
More telephone encounters with Martha. Once again, it is Merrill brokerage assistant Doug Faneuil testifying to a brief but firey chat with home-decorating doyenne Martha Stewart: Stewart was on the phone with Bacanovic, but when Bacanovic had to find some...
According to the Wall Street Journal, the following two emails are from ex-Merrill Lynch broker Douglas Faneuil to a friend about his pre-ImClone-debacle phone conversations with Martha Stewart. As you can tell, she wasn't always particularly demure. Of course, the...
Here, from Doug Faneuil's testimony today, is the crux of the case the prosecution is trying to bring against Martha Stewart in the current "insider trading" case: SCENE -- Doug Faneuil's office. Merrill Lynch. The phone ring. Douglas Faneuil: "Hello?"...
From testimony today during the ongoing Martha Stewart trial. Emily Perret, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal's one-time assistant, is testifying under direct examination. She says that Martha Stewart called ImClone offices and demanded Sam call her back and tell her what...
According to the current Advertising Age, things were busy, if nervous, at this week's National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE -- pronounced to (sort of) rhyme with "nasty") conference in Las Vegas. TV execs can't figure out where the...
How responsible should petrol stations be for how customers' credit card information is collected & used? One would think, highly responsible. After all, it is their pumps into which customer insert their credit cards. If station owners fail to secure...
My National Post column today was on bumpf and posturing at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos.Update: Ah, if only I had seen this story before I had written the above column. Apparently the WEF anticipated my criticisms...
Microsoft's quarterly financial results tonight seemingly have many investors in a tizzy. It has nothing to do with the higher-than-expected equity compensation costs, however. Those are shuffling of costs from one period to another, and it isn't all that important...
Quirky piece in the Independent about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's recent marriage to romance novelist Melanie Craft. It is requisitely snide in that U.K. way, so you get bon mots like the following: "At 34, Ms Craft is 25 years...
Some snippets from my Tuesday National Post column about the escalating struggle over Hollinger International and Conrad Black: You can cut the schadenfreude with a knife. The latest twists in the Conrad Black affair have Canadian media sorts nearly giddy...
You'll have to read my column in Tuesday's National Post to get my views of the latest developments in the tussle between Conrad Black and the company, Hollinger International, that he once ran as a private fiefdom. I promise that...
So, here is the math on what prosecutors are looking for in Lea Fastow's (Enron insider) and Martha Stewart's (ImClone trading) jail terms, respectively. I measure the terms in YpM -- years in jail for every million dollars in the...
According to the Houston Chronicle, former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow is negotiating a plea bargain that would send him to federal prison. He has apparently been offered a 10-year sentence. It's not clear whether those figures presume that Mr. Fastow...
Not to become "Martha watch" or the like, but this piece from the February New Yorker deserves a mention. It is strangely touching, with Jeffrey Toobin's elegaic tone exactly right for the fin de siecle feel that the piece has --...
News this morning that Martha Stewart was server her indictment in New York. Here then is another column of mine on the silly subject -- it ran in the National Post today:...
L'affaire Martha Stewart seems to be circling the drain in preparation for a conclusion. The Financial Times is reporting that Ms. Stewart (well, her lawyers actually) tried to end-run local Department of Justice officials, appealing directly to senior folks. While...
It is a kind of metaphysical financial question: What happens if you scam people but no-one is scammed? Paul Tetu, a self-described "aspiring screenplay writer, novelist, and movie producer" tested the question recently. (Don't you love the "aspiring" part?) As...
While "bookie of virtue" William Bennett has so far escaped a direct connection between his private video gambling and his publicly virtuous positions, I have scooped the New York Times, the Washington Post, and everyone else in finding it. It...
