[NY Post] Jon Corzine, the CEO of bankrupt broker-dealer MF Global, saw his reputation tossed from the frying pan right into the regulatory fire yesterday when Sherlocks discovered as much as $700 million in customer funds missing from the firm.Officials from two US regulators, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, were looking into whether the loot was diverted to support some of the firm's own trades.
As if the allegedly missing funds, which happened on Corzine's watch, are not bad enough, it was learned late yesterday that the $700 million was responsible for capsizing a potential deal between MF Global and rival Interactive Brokers Group that could have saved the firm and the jobs of the company's 2,870 employees worldwide.
Word of the possibly purloined funds came hours after MF Global was forced to filed for bankruptcy protection after its debt ratings had been downgraded to junk status on the discovery that the firm had $6.3 billion of European sovereign debt on its books -- twice as much as its larger Wall Street rivals.
Corzine pushed the firm to buy up the debt.
It was an amazing week for the one-time Goldman Sachs
...Malefactors of Great Wealth, the second most generous contributor to the 2008 Obama campaign, with a total of $1,013,091...
co-CEO, US (Democrat Party) Senator from New Jersey and Garden State governor.
MF Global's Chapter 11 was the eighth-largest bankruptcy filing in US history and an embarrassing turn of events for a budding brokerage franchise that choked on too much Euro trash.
For Corzine, it was such a gut-wrenching plunge from grace that if his reputation masqueraded during Halloween as Lehman Brothers' disgraced former CEO Dick Fuld, many would have thought it less scary.
MF Global's shocking bankruptcy comes three years after Fuld's firm went bust on toxic mortgage debt during the credit crisis in 2008.
A heavyweight in both Wall Street and Washington circles, Corzine was even considered a potential cabinet member in President B.O.'s administration just last summer.
Indeed, MF creditors were so concerned that Corzine might quit to take a White House post that they demanded an "Obama clause" be inserted in a $325 million bond offering -- in which MF would shell out an extra 1 percent in interest if Corzine left for a government post by 2013.