Goldman Sachs partner managing director Richard Kimball Jr. apparently got in some trubs with his Southampton neighbors this summer. His neighbors are people who say judgey stuff like “he is certainly enjoying the life of a single man” (Rick is divorced from Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson’s daughter, Holly, who you might know from her memoir about screwing the male nanny) and “there were a series of wild pool parties going on late until the night, with a lot of young pretty girls” (the implication being that these women are whores and Dick was throwing off the wall fuck-fests even Eliot Spitzer wouldn’t attend, not even in the hardcorest of his hooker banging days). Obviously they would’ve been cool with the hos if they’d been invited over to join the fun but they weren’t so they called the cops and had that shit shut down. Several times. Oh, but they weren’t done there. Next they got Page Six on the horn and started crunching numbers.
“Another neighbor went round to get them to turn it down, and she came back saying there were a lot of topless girls around the pool with just two or three guys.
A lot of girls? Only two or three guys? Could that mean anything but insane orgies? Not in my world. This is the best part:
“Many of the residents say he ruined their summer. It’s pretty arrogant behavior.”
Got that? He ruined their summer. The whole thing. Down the drain.
Ladies, if you’ve been looking to work under one of the greats, today is your lucky day. Not Lenny Dykstra– you wish– but the next best thing. Biff Basness is looking to fill a couple of positions ASAP. AQR’s head of trading, who “more or less built up the whole trading desk by himself” and was “in charge of the firm’s discretionary and high frequency trading operations” quit yesterday. Some color from inside the lair:
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Since the dawn of ESPN, the NHL has fought an uphill battle to assert itself as a big time sport. The league may be a long way away from overtaking the NFL in terms of ratings, but when it comes to fraud, the NHL can claim recent superiority. As Eugene Lockhart prepares to defend himself against allegations of involvement in a $20 million mortgage scheme, a former co-owner of the San Jose Sharks, William “Boots” Del Biaggio III, will be spending the next 8 years in a federal penalty box for defrauding an impressively diverse group to obtain $100 million in guaranteed loans. On Boots’ hit list were the owners of the Minnesota Wild, LA Kings, a bank he co-founded with his father, and a broker with a 7-figure debt.
Del Biaggio set his crime in motion by turning to David Cacchione, a financially strapped stockbroker at Merriman Curhan Ford Group Inc. who owed him $2 million. According to federal prosecutors and the SEC, Cacchione e-mailed Del Biaggio account statements from several wealthy Merriman clients showing tens of millions of dollars worth of stock holdings…Del Biaggio then doctored the account statements by cutting out the clients’ names and pasting in his own and presenting them to the banks and NHL owners as collateral.
Demonstrating that he is a former NHL owner and not a former NHL player, Boots let the waterworks flow yesterday during his sentencing and then channeled his inner Dick Fuld.
I was blinded by pride and ego,” he said. “Everyone makes mistakes. I will come back from this and I refuse to let this define my life.”
NHL owner gets 8 years prison for fraud scheme [Fox Sports]
$$$ Ken Griffin (Meredith Whitney, Blankfein, Spitzer, etc) reflect on Lehman biting the big one : “I was at my grandmother’s house late Sunday afternoon when a colleague called and said it looked like bankruptcy was inevitable for Lehman. My grandmother, who is 96, lived her whole life in fear of the next depression. But in a great bit of irony, she took this catastrophe in stride. I, however, had been very worried. When the market was down only a few percentage points on Monday, I felt like the boy who cried wolf. But then the First Reserve money market fund broke the buck, and money markets stopped buying the commercial paper of financial institutions. What was set in motion was an underwater earthquake. There would be rumors in the days following that Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Citadel would be next to fall. I credit my team for doing everything possible to make sure we were prepared for the worst.” [Fortune]
$$$ What it feels like to hug Dick Fuld [Daily Intel]
$$$ Cuomo considers charges against Bank of America execs. [MarketWatch]
$$$ Pornographer busted for faking it. [The Deal]
$$$ Fairfield Greenwich Settles Massachusetts Regulatory Action [Reuters]
$$$ In case you’re looking to meet up with Shia LaBeouf tonight. [FG]
$$$ Or tomorrow morning. 77th between Lex and Third. 6AM.
Some former Dresdner employees have incorporated an interesting twist on the class action lawsuit concept. A total of 72 bankers are joining together and going after Commerzbank for close to $50 million they claim they are still owed, with interest, after getting only ten cents on every bonus dollar due to them after the new guard took over.
Commerzbank, which has tapped Germany for 18.2 billion euros of capital, withheld bonuses and severance pay for Dresdner executives after taking control of Dresdner Kleinwort in January. More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed against the bank in London and Frankfurt over unpaid bonus and severance.
“Dresdner Bank was fully entitled to take the actions it did in relation to Dresdner Kleinwort employees’ discretionary bonuses in light of the marked deterioration in the investment bank’s performance in the months of November and December 2008,” Commerzbank said in an e-mailed statement. “The bank will be defending these claims vigorously in the courts.”
But the potential damage to Dresdner Commerzbank undoubtedly goes well beyond $50 million or so. Once shareholders learn the bank paid even 10% of these bonuses, Commerzbank, in sort of a lawsuit-squared structure, may find itself being sued for what it’s being sued for.
Commerzbank Sued for $49 Million by 72 Bankers Over Bonuses [Bloomberg]
The ‘berg had a story running on the main page for the better part of this morning today about two SAC employees who’d been let go from the London office in September and were recently rehired. That was pretty much all there was to it, save for this mind-blowing bit of career advice: “The message is don’t burn your bridges and leave on bad terms,” said Clayton Heijman, founder and CEO of Darwin Platform, an Amsterdam-based provider of hedge-fund services. “The hedge-fund universe is a very small community, and you never know when you may need your former employer again.” We’re going to assume here that Bloomberg didn’t simply throw that in as an attempt to legitimize an otherwise a remarkably unremarkable story, but instead to lay a coded message on the asses of current candy stripers at the House of Stevie. Apparently it’s become something a trend for those banished from the Cohen Kingdom to lash out in the heat of the moment and do things they might later regret, effectively screwing themselves out of a second shot at glory on the off-chance the big guy might ask his number two a few months down the road, “Who was that trader we fired over the summer? The one with the ass you could bounce a quarter off of?” “Bob?” “Yeah Bob. Let’s get him back.” So that you might keep yourself all good in Stevie’s neighborhood, we’ve provided a list of bridge-burning transgressions that will result in you not getting invited back to the party. You’d be wise to not:
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Faced with rapidly rising default rates, the FHA must be scrambling around trying to find a way to stop the bleeding. And in seeking guidance for a sound solution, who better to look to than Lenny Dykstra? While Nails may have come up with an unconventional course of action for the FHA, it’s effective.
The home defiling movement that Lenny recently helped shine the spotlight on is doing wonders to make homes more affordable, reignite the market, and save the FHA. No stranger to inflated home prices, thieves in Arizona are helping spur organic growth by stripping foreclosed properties of every fixture that has even the slightest change of being resold on Craigslist.,
“Without question, probably 85 to 90 percent of houses on the market under $200,000 have been stripped,” said Tempe real-estate agent Kim Baker.
“Appliances are the most commonly poached item, but plumbing fixtures and faucets, ceiling fans, light fixtures, water heaters and air-conditioning units are fair game” in the eyes of the strippers, she said.
As the FHA will not extend a loan on a property that is not intact, the Dykstra Plan will likely save the agency untold millions by forcing people to seek more expensive, toilet inclusive homes falling outside of the FHA’s purview.
Theft of fixtures becomes major risk in foreclosures [Arizona Republic]
So Bill G let it slip in the last few seconds of Power Lunch earlier that Shia LaBeouf was visiting Englewood Cliffs today, as part of research for his upcoming role in Money Never Sleeps. Assuming that this wasn’t just a fantasy on Bill’s part, one must ask, what the hell could Shi-B possibly be doing about at the bunny ranch this afternoon? He’s supposed to be playing a trader, but perhaps in a last minute re-write to the script, his character, having lost everything, becomes a financial journalist? In which case he’s spending the afternoon shadowing Ron Insana? Other ideas that come to mind: training with Charlie Gasparino so he’ll have that “jacked” look on camera (today: massacring the pec dec, tomorrow: blasting the hams)? Running flash cards with Maria Bartiomo for her next stint at Celebrity Jeopardy? The unenviable task of injecting Jim Cramer with an EpiPen? And, most harrowingly and most likely, given that he was absent during the whole show, male bonding with Dennis Kneale? Tell me.
Maybe but probably not. I know it’s fun to malign Goldman employees, and what with their penchant for trolling the internet for underage tail and paying for sex, Denis Morley probably thought he had this one in the bag. But I’m just not buying it. According to Morley, his (estranged) wife, Alzbeta Holmokova, was bribed by Yann Samuelides, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, to get married (the happy couple, pictured above, met when Samuelides became Holmokava’s client in the pay for lay business). Supposedly she said no to the offer, and told Sam she “loved and respected her husband.” This, of course, is all coming from Morely, whose wife is trying her hardest to get divorced from the guy, who showed remarkable restraint in not adding “devastatingly handsome” and “cock from the gods” to the alleged quote. Morely also claims that the reason his wife didn’t end things immediately with Sammy was that the GS’er threatened to commit suicide if she left him, to which the jilted husband responded, “Well, you’d better keep seeing him.” I haven’t figured out exactly who’s playing who, or if they’re all in on it together, but someone is for sure being taken for a ride.
You’ve got the next three minutes to guess what words of wisdom 50 Cent will impart on the Power Lunch crew. Ready. Go.
Ask most officials in the current administration what sort of place would legalize tax evasion and you’d probably hear sermons about locales run by nefarious cronies whose back room dealings completely remove any semblance of confidence in local markets. Ask the World Economic Forum and they’ll tell you one of those places happens to be the most competitive economy in the world, Switzerland. While other major industrialized countries race to team up with one another and draw lines in the sand for what is economically right and wrong, the one country that goes it alone wound up on top .
The U.S. fell to second position for the first time since the Geneva-based organization began its current index in 2004 as it lost marks for the sophistication of its markets and rising budget deficits. Switzerland was credited for its stability and ability to innovate.
Its ability to innovate has been on prominent display recently. Faced with intense persecution from the IRS and current administration over its secrecy laws, the Swiss managed to find a way to (temporarily) pacify the tax hounds, keep roughly 90% of American account holders’ identities secret, and give those who may be at risk of being detected some advance warning.
UBS has said that it has 52,000 American clients — the number originally sought by the I.R.S. and the Justice Department — meaning that it will disclose fewer than one in nine names. Those 4,450 clients hold a total of $18 billion in assets.
“They are understandably trying to spook people into coming forward,” (Caplin & Drysdale partner H. David) Rosenbloom said. “I doubt that strategy works for large account holders, particularly in a world where they will receive notice from UBS in advance of a disclosure. They will, of course, wait to see whether that notice arrives. And I suspect some will escape the filters.”
It’s a relief the administration is tackling this critical issue at the same time the country came in an impressive 108th for soundness of banks. Hopefully by this time next year there will be a slightly greater distinction between the perceived soundness of US banks and the often overlooked Albanian banks (104th).
Swiss Deal With I.R.S. May Hide Some Tax Cheats [NYT]
