Foreign Collusion, Naked Shorting (Counterfeiting) & Money Laundering — All Illicit Wealth
Roddy Boyd
New York Post cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 16 February 2006
Two state securities regulators have issued subpoenas to get at the trading records of Wall Street’s largest firms in a quest to stamp out the controversial practice of naked short-selling, sources said.
Naked shorting — the tactic of selling shares short without properly borrowing them first in order to bet on a stock’s fall — has been a concern of state securities regulators during the past year.
CFRN,Bud Burrell,attorney Ron Logan,’naked short’ penny stock scam,Phoenix,Arizona
Tony Ryals, 08 February 2006
Note ‘Bob O’Brien’,who refuses to identify himself, has threatened both Marc Cohodes a hedge fund manager and myself a defrauded investor in his scam on Yahhoo.com NFI and OSTK message boards. Continue reading “Article: CFRN,Bud Burrell,attorney Ron Logan,’naked short’ penny stock scam,Phoenix,Arizona”
JPMorgan faces $2.2B Fraud Lawsuit over Bonds
Reuters cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 3 February 2006
JPMorgan Chase faces a civil lawsuit accusing the No. 3 U.S. bank of defrauding bond investors and others out of at least $2.2 billion over more than 20 years.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday with the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, seeks class-action status.
It accuses New York-based JPMorgan and its predecessors of deleting records for $46.8 billion of bonds that investors had not cashed in, covering up its errors, refusing to pay back bondholders, and collecting fees it did not deserve.
Steven Syre
The Boston Globe cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 31 January 2006
American Business Financial Services Inc. was a big business with serious problems long before it ended up on the bankruptcy liquidation scrap heap. The company’s line on its own slow-motion demise relied heavily on stock market conspiracy theories.
The Philadelphia subprime lender has filed several lawsuits claiming illegal market manipulation by investors trying to profit on the company’s woes. The latest version was filed last month in federal court in Delaware by its bankruptcy trustee against Boston Partners Asset Management.
BETHANY MCLEAN, 14 November 2005
Even hardened denizens of Wall Street were shocked by a conference call that Patrick Byrne, the CEO of online retailer Overstock.com, held on Aug. 12. “I want to get something off my chest,” Byrne announced. Then he launched into a rant about a “miscreants ball” in which he mentioned hedge funds, journalists, investigators, trial lawyers, the SEC, and even Eliot Spitzer. “I believe there’s been a plan since we were in our teens to destroy our stock, drive it down to $6–$10 … and even a plan for how the company would then get whacked up.” The “designated final owner,” who provided the “orchestration,” was someone Byrne dubbed the “Sith Lord,” a person he refused to identify other than to say that “he’s one of the master criminals from the 1980s.” And that’s just the basic outline. There was more. As Mark Cuban, the billionaire investor, later wrote on his blog, “Never before in the history of Wall Street has a single conference call mentioned the following topics: miscreants, an unnamed Sith Lord he hopes the feds will bury under a prison, gay bathhouses, whether he is gay, does cocaine, both or neither, and an obligatory ‘not that there is anything wrong with that,’ phone taps, phone lines misdirected to Mexico, arrested reporters, payoffs, conspiracies, crooks, egomaniacs, fools, paranoia, which newspapers are shills and for who, payoffs, money laundering, his Irish temper, false identities, threats, intimidation, and private investigators. All in 61 minutes.” Cuban is now short 20,000 shares of Overstock. Continue reading “Article: Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne is waging an EXTRAORDINARY CAMPAIGN against short-sellers. The hedge fund guys say he has underperformed. He says they are tools of a sinister “SITH LORD.””
Daniel Kadlec
TIME, 9 November 2006
Thomas Badian was expecting a package, just not this one. Standing in his doorway, smiling, he opened the envelope a courier handed to him. Then he froze, and the color drained from his face. It was over: after two years overseas, the former New York City hedge-fund operator had been located.
Bethany McLean
CNN Money, 1 November 2005
Patrick Byrne, the 42-year-old CEO of online retail liquidator Overstock.com, is under growing pressure to deliver numbers that prove his business will make money.
Certainly the third-quarter results, announced on Friday, Oct. 28, did not help his cause. Once again Overstock.com (Research) lost far more than analysts were expecting.
John Reeves, 05 October 2005
The nearly endless fount of mirth surrounding Patrick Byrne’s lawsuit against Gradient Analytics, short-selling hedge fund Rocker Partners, and others is obscuring a case with fairly broad implications for security analysis, First Amendment rights, and the credibility of our public markets.
While fanciful visions of Sith Lords and evil shorting hordes make for good copy, this is a lawsuit that is about something more substantive: an accusation that Gradient and Rocker resorted to unfair business practices to knock down Overstock.com’s (NASDAQ:OSTK) share price. Too much coverage has been spent plumbing the entertainment value, and nearly none on the facts of the suit itself. Continue reading “Article: Overstock’s Three Affidavits”
Christopher Byron
New York Post cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 26 September 2005
One of the first things any new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission does after getting the job is to clear his throat, put on his best “I mean business” scowl, and announce to the world just how tough he intends to be on the miscreants of Wall Street.
Normally, this harmless ritual lets the man taking on Washington’s most thankless job preen a bit in public before getting smacked to the canvas by a system that basically doesn’t want him to be tough at all.
But these are not normal times — and the one thing this country needs more than anything is a government that knows what it is doing and that deserves to be taken seriously by its citizens.
Mark Faulk
FaulkingTruth.com cited by RGM Communications via Wayback, 20 September 2005
In yet another twist in the stock market scandal known as Stockgate, the Faulking Truth has learned that Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, has shelved a planned Senate Subcommittee Hearing investigating the issue. Originally scheduled for February of this year, and then postponed several times, the hearing, which has been advocated by Senator Robert Bennett (R-UT), has been cancelled indefinitely.
According to a reliable source inside of the planned investigation, “The authority and the responsibility to take the necessary steps to deal with the issue of naked short selling lies squarely at the feet of Senator Shelby, and he has chosen not to allow the planned Senate Banking Subcommittee hearing to go forward.” In an earlier interview with the same source, we were told that “Senator Shelby tends to grab things like this for his own purposes, and his own purposes don’t always mesh with what’s best for the public.”
Kevin Kelleher
TheStreet, 29 August 2005
It all started when the company completed a 350-to-1 reverse stock split — an unusual step in itself, but one that paled alongside what came next. With 5.43 million shares outstanding and a float of 1.15 million shares, Global Links saw trading volume of 143.5 million shares in the first four sessions of February, driving the stock as low as 8/100ths of a penny.
Kevin Kelleher
The Street, 18 August 2005
Naked shorts. There’s something about those two words that begs for sensational coverage. But the scarcity of hard data on the illicit trading tactic so far has only polarized the debate on how serious a problem it has become.
Overstock Faces SEC Probe, Details Short-Selling Lawsuit
Carol S. Remond | Dow Jones Newswires, 12 August 2005
Overstock.com President Patrick Byrne said in a conference call Friday that the Securities and Exchange Commission began an informal inquiry into the company in February. Continue reading “Article: Overstock Faces SEC Probe, Details Short-Selling Lawsuit”
CIBC will pay $125M US fine to settle mutual fund trading investigation
CBC News, 20 July 2005
CIBC confirmed Wednesday it will pay out $125 million US to settle an investigation into the bank’s role on behalf of hedge funds that engaged in improper mutual fund market timing and late trading. The bank said the deal was reached with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the New York Attorney General’s Office.
The agreement will see two of the bank’s subsidiaries, CIBC World Markets Corp. and Canadian Imperial Holdings Inc., pay a penalty of $25 million US and disgorgement of $100 million US related to financing and brokerage services provided to the hedge funds.
Continue reading “Article: CIBC will pay $125M US fine to settle mutual fund trading investigation”
How CIBC Cashed In on Mutual Fund Fraud
MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN, 20 July 2005
One of the darkest realms of the mutual-fund trading scandal was laid bare Wednesday as state and federal prosecutors detailed how a Toronto financial company served as broker, banker and back office in a hedge fund scheme that victimized thousands of retail investors. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce agreed to pay $125 million to settle the charges, which included fraud and deceptive business acts. The allegations cover a five-year period in which dozens of hedge funds used the bank’s money and connections to make abusive trades that resulted in huge profits to them but diluted other investors’ overall returns. From 1998 to 2003, regulators say, CIBC lent up to $2 billion to such traders, generating more than $75 million in fees. The bank neither admitted nor denied guilt in the settlement.
Continue reading “Article: How CIBC Cashed In on Mutual Fund Fraud”
THE DOLLAR HAS NO INTRINSIC VALUE : DO YOUR ASSETS?
