John Reed, who played kind of a big role in cobbling together the world’s largest diversified whorehouse, has something to get off his chest:
“I’m sorry,” Reed, 70, said in an interview yesterday. “These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it’s not easy to see what’s happened.”
John S. Reed, who helped engineer the merger that created Citigroup Inc., was apologizing for his role in building a company that has taken $45 billion in direct U.S. aid and said banks that big should be divided into separate parts.
Is he really sorry? Or was this just an attempt to get Vikram to hold him close and insist “it’s not your fault” over and over? Unclear (though we wouldn’t fault him if it were the latter). In any event, does anyone else have something they want to apologize for today? Related to Citi or not? Throw it out there. We’re all listening.
Reed Says I’m Sorry For Role In Creating Citigroup [Bloomberg]
When Zvi “Octopussy” Goffer decided to dip one of his tentacles in the sweetness of insider trading, do you think he realized all that he’d be forced to give up if caught? Obviously we’re not talking about his wife, child, and freedom to wear tracksuits here, but rather the chance to wake up with his brother and a bunch of other dudes the morning after what appears to have been quite the rager?
For the good of the market, encourage your MBA-candidate friends in Cambridge to pursue careers in the cross-dressing and law enforcement fields.
2009 Harvard MBA Indicator Shifts to ‘Neutral’ [PDF]
A Contrary Indicator On MBA’s And Stocks [DealBook]
The (alleged) fraud at German fund of hedge funds firm K1 Group is an embarrassment of riches for the schadenfreude set. Today, for example, we glean new evidence for two well-established facts–that regulators are simply no good at catching fraud on their own, and that Bear Stearns was a disaster waiting to happen–and learn that diplomatic immunity may apply to trans-Atlantic fraud cases.
Let’s start there: Helmut Kiener, who has been arrested on suspicion of fraud by German police but not yet charged with anything, wants to get out of jail. But apparently there’s only one way to do that at this particular stage in a German legal proceeding, and that’s if you are a bonafide diplomat.
Now, we have no idea whether Kiener is such a diplomat, or what country or international organization he claims to represent. But we’ll find out if the German courts buy it “before next week,” according to the prosecutor’s office.
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October performance for Tudor’s Tensor Fund (does not spell fried chicken):
October 2009: (4.32%)
YTD: 0.98%
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When your dreams of expansion have been rebuffed at just about every turn for a decade, it forces you to think outside the box. So goodbye, London, Paris and Amsterdam: Deutsche Börse is (trying) to go to Warsaw.
Seventy years after a very special moment in German-Polish relations, the owner of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange is bidding for what locals affectionately refer to as the Giełda Papierów Wartościowych w Warszawie. The other other DB hopes to buy a majority stake in the bourse from its current majority owner, a widely-respected exchange operator called the Polish government.
Deutsche Börse thinks the Warsaw exchange is an “attractive investment.” Maybe it is. Maybe anything looks good after you’ve been humiliated in your attempt to buy the London Stock Exchange and bested by those Wall Street bastards in bidding for Euronext.
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H.L. Mencken famously said, “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” But Citigroup’s hedge fund and private equity business seems intent on proving the great skeptic wrong.
An awful lot has gone wrong at C in recent years, so maybe the woes of Citi Alternative Investments have passed by your notice. Allow us to recap: Seeking a potential successor to CEO Chuck Prince, Citi ponies up $800 million to buy Old Lane Partners in April 2007, founded by former Morgan Stanley exec. Vikram Pandit, who is named head of Citi AI. Citi quickly guts its existing flagship hedge fund, Tribeca Global Management, to accommodate Pandit. On the one hand, this worked out, because Pandit was running the show at Citi by the end of 2007. On the other hand, it did not work. At all.
That very year, Citi was already bailing out one of its hedge funds, Corporate Special Opportunities, to the tune of almost $1.8 billion. It did not work. Just a month after Vikram took the helm at Citi, CSO froze redemptions, when it went under earlier this year, investors got back just 3 cents on the dollar and its former manager sued the firm for wrongful termination.
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Schottenfeld Draws Scrutiny After Goffer Arrest in Insider Case (Bloomberg)
Zvi “Octopussy” Goffer’s employer has stated on previous occasions that this sort of thing is not cool but apparently no one was listening when he laid down the law. “There is no place at our firm for individuals who violate the securities laws,” Schottenfeld’s chairman, Richard Schottenfeld, said in an April 2008 statement.
Citi To Relaunch Troubled Hedge Fund Unit (FT)
Oh but don’t worry about people with good memories. C’s got a plan to throw them off the trail: “People close to the situation said that the company wanted to change the name of the unit – which has $14bn under management and also includes private equity operations – from Citi Alternative Investments (CAI) to Citi Capital Advisors.”
AIG Swings To Third-Quarter Profit After Write-Downs (WSJ)
AIG posted a profit of $455 million, or 68 cents a share, compared with a year-earlier loss of $24.47 billion, or $181.02 a share. The latest results included $1.8 billion in capital losses, while the previous year’s results included billions in write-downs from credit-default swaps and $15.06 billion in capital losses.
SEC Appoints Hedge Fund Veteran As Adviser (NYT)
Mr. Bookstaber, a former risk manager at banks like Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley and hedge funds like Ziff Brothers International and Moore Capital Management, is one of three new advisers to help the S.E.C. identify risks and trends in the financial markets. Also, he wrote a book! 2007′s “A Demon of Our Own Design.”
Banks Thwarting Feinberg Pay Model By Changing Bonus Formula (Bloomberg)
Suck it, Comp Cop.
Final Arguments Against 2 In Bear Stearns Fraud Case (NYT)
Mr. Cioffi, whose wife and children have attended the proceedings nearly every day, seemed confident he would be exonerated as he chatted with family members and friends before closing statements. “You can listen to the government call me a bum for three hours, and then my lawyers will get up and set the record straight,” he told a friend.
“New York City” dayA few former employees are learning that it’s a bad idea to poke a Tiger cub. That applies ten-fold to the leader of the pack, the inimitable Julian Robertson.
The Tiger Management founder had a tough 2000. The then-68-year-old shuttered his legendary hedge fund because he didn’t understand those newfangled gadgets that everyone on the Street was going so crazy for. Then, the New York State Dept. of Taxation and Finance slapped him with a huge freakin’ tax bill, saying he’d spent more than half of the year living in the Big Apple.
Not so, J-Rob countered: He only spent exactly 183 days in the city that year. And he launched an all-out war to prove it. Robertson and his staff spent a ridiculously extraordinary amount of time trying to account for the big guy’s every step nine years ago. In the end, it came down to just four days, including, ironically, tax day, April 15.
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Quite a few months back, a couple of former Touradji Capital Management employees sued the hedge fund for some $50 million in unpaid bonuses. Yesterday, in its own lawsuit, Touradji made explicitly clear why it didn’t pay Gentry Beach and Robert Vollero the money they think they are owed. And the hedge fund is demanding $250 million for its trouble.
In the 55-page suit, Touradji lays out in exquisite detail what a couple of screw-ups Beach and Vollero allegedly are. A selection:
- “Beach and Vollero were responsible for the destruction of millions of dollars of investor capital through a pattern of fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty and utter disregard for the interests of the investors whose capital they were obligated to protect.”
- Beach’s father stole $500,000 from a joint-venture private equity investment with Touradji. “Contemporaneously with these events, on September 26, 2008, Gentry Beach claimed that he was ‘forced to resign’ from Touradji Capital–even filing a false police report in which he claimed he had been threatened–when in fact he had already set up a competing business well before that time.”
- After Beach left the firm, “Vollero remaind at Touradji Capital deviously and unethically gathering confidential information about the firm and creating a fraudulent record concerning his compensation….”
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