MF Global Holdings Ltd., the broker that filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31

MF Global $1.2 billion or more shortfall

As the sprawling probe that includes regulators, criminal and congressional investigators, and court-appointed trustees grinds on, the findings so far suggest that a “significant amount” of the money could have “vaporized” as a result of chaotic trading at MF Global during the week before the company’s Oct. 31 bankruptcy filing, said a person close to the investigation.
[UK]T the so-called “bar date” for claims to be submitted is February 29 under the Financial Services Authority’s (FSA) new “Special Administration Regime” (SAR), which has been designed to speed up the return of assets to creditors.
[November 21 2011]“Their books are a disaster,” Scott O’Malia, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview two weeks ago. The newspaper also quoted Thomas Peterffy, CEO of Interactive Brokers Group Inc., saying: “I always knew the records were in shambles, but I didn’t know to what extent.”
If Pricewaterhouse can’t spot control weaknesses at a relatively small shop like MF, which had $41 billion of assets, it’s a bit much to expect that the firm would catch anything materially amiss at Goldman, which has $949 billion (GS) of assets, or at a serial acquirer such as JPMorgan, with $2.3 trillion (JPM) of assets.

Fortunately for Pricewaterhouse, there’s no better alternative. What’s Goldman or JPMorgan going to do? Switch to KPMG LLP? Or Ernst & Young LLP? Or Deloitte & Touche LLP? Their track records are no better.
;November 21]The amount of customer funds missing from accounts at the bankrupt brokerage MF Global “may be as much as $1.2 billion or more,” the trustee overseeing the firm’s liquidation said Nov.21
That would be roughly double previous estimates of about $600 million.In a statement, trustee James W. Giddens said the estimate is preliminary and “may well change.”
[Thursday, November 17, 5:01 PM ]It’s looking like outright theft at MF Global (MFGLQ.PK), where investigators believe some of the customer accounts were raided to pay off losing bets, meaning the money isn’t missing, it’s gone. Sources say $593M in client funds remains unaccounted for. Like other brokers, MF was allowed to borrow customer cash if it put up collateral, but it appears the firm did not provide the necessary backing. Ex-Corzine employee and current CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler, said he first learned of the missing funds during a 2:30 a.m. call on Oct. 31, he and Jon Corzine had ties at Goldman Sachs (GS) and in the Senate, where Gensler was an aide. . MF Global Holdings Ltd., the broker filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31. CME Group Inc., the world’s largest futures exchange, audited MF Global during the week before the bankruptcy and found the accounts were properly segregated. The shortfall in client funds was discovered during the weekend before the bankruptcy. Transfers at MF Global were made “in a manner that may have been designed to avoid detection,” CME said
[November 12]Corzine played a central role in convincing the CFTC to hold off implementing regulations that might have prevented the company’s collapse. While regulators were pressing to limit the ability of financial firms to essentially borrow money from their own customers, Corzine, a former New Jersey governor and former Goldman Sachs chairman, led the charge against the proposed rule, using his prolific list of contacts in Washington. In the end, CFTC chairman Gary Gensler, who had worked for Corzine at Goldman Sachs, delayed the vote on the new rule until the fall.
The $593 million shortfall in client money at MF Global Holdings Ltd., the broker that filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31, appears to result from a “massive hide- and-seek ploy,” Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a Democrat, said today.

UBS trader Kweku Adoboli

[Sept. 24]Oswald Gruebel, chief executive officer of UBS AG (UBSN) since February 2009, resigned his post at Switzerland’s largest bank after a $2.3 billion loss from unauthorized trading.

He will be replaced on an interim basis by Sergio P. Ermotti, the bank’s CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, UBS said

UBS’s Americas investment-banking division will spend part of the week golfing at California resort Pebble Beach with the company’s top clients

Now 2.3 bn: UBS trader Kweku Adoboli had no hedges in place , breaching the risk limits, then entered “fictitious” hedges. The UBS statement claimed Mr Adoboli had conducted legitimate derivative transactions, giving the bank heavy exposure to various stock market indexes. But he had then entered “fictitious” hedges against these positions into UBS’ risk management system, while in reality he had no hedge in place and was breaching the risk limits that the bank required him to work within.

UBS, for example, is offering managing directors base pay as high as 300,000 pounds ($470,000), double the amount of last May. [February 2010]
“How are you going to explain to your shareholders and employees that you’ve lost this amount from the acts of a single young employee in a trading room?”
City experts questioned how many other rogue trader cases never get exposed. Onno Steenbeck of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, a co-author of a paper on Leeson’s strategy, said: “Leeson believed in doubling up, like a naive gambler. He sometimes got lucky and got out of the misery but nobody knows how many Nick Leesons there are who got lucky and we never found out about.”
One current hedge fund trader, who declined to be named, added: “Of course there are bound to be people on the other side [of the UBS losses] who made miraculously large sums of money that weren’t authorised. They will be kept quiet. You won’t hear about it.”

His desk specialized in ETFs. But the alleged scheme centered not on the trading of those relatively plain-vanilla securities but on the hedging of risk, people familiar with the matter said. The false accounting charges, said to have taken place between October 2008 and December 2009, and January 2010 and September 2011, said UBS trader Kweku Adoboli had falsified “an exchange traded fund made or acquired for an accounting purpose” and falsified “an exchange traded fund transaction and other internal records.” UBS believes that the losses were accumulated in a large number of small trades over many months, not in one big deal.

As the City tough guy Paul Myners reportedly said, we never hear about the unauthorised rogue profits that arise from casino-style speculations – only about the rogue losses that are adding to market instability at a really unhelpful time.
Whether UBS is shown to have been aware of Adoboli’s trading is almost beside the point. If the bank was aware of it and did not stop it, then its failure to do so is unconscionable. If it was not aware of the trades, then its compliance and risk management departments’ failure to prevent them from happening in the first place is equally appalling.
In the post-Lehman, Dodd-Frank, Basel-III era, it is nearly unfathomable that a global bank of UBS’s heft, wealth and importance could allow this kind of loss to occur. Where were the adults?
>>>If it was possible there, where else?

Michelle Williams at DGA Awards

Michelle Williams at SAG Awards

The 31-year-old My Week With Marilyn actress presented the DGA Documentary Award to Project Nim‘s James Marsh, but accepted it on his behalf as he was not at the ceremony. 12/28/12

…live with Matilda in Brooklyn. “I’d been living there for a while, but Heath fell for it as soon as he spent time there,” says Williams, who sports an engagement ring from her fiancé. 12/15/2005
Michelle Williams may want you to be blinded by the enormous diamond she’s wearing on her ring finger, but she certainly doesn’t want to you to ask about it February 6, 2007

Claudia Gonzalez Romo , 40, the daughter of actress Celia Romo is director of Marketing in the Global Fund, an international institution that invests funds for the fight against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria-the sister of the Mexican actress Celia Romo- lives in Geneva with her two kids. Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the New York Times, and González are dividing their time between his home in New York and her home in Switzerland, and that they see each other every two weeks. The 60-year-old chairman is serving as interim CEO amid internal concerns about his travels overseas, according to two people familiar with the matter. In the last 19 months, Sulzberger has attended at least a dozen conferences and panels in Istanbul, Beijing, Munich, London, Paris and Switzerland where his girlfriend, Claudia Gonzalez, works. His trips are aimed at establishing Times Co. as a global brand, Times Co. is looking for a non-family member to be CEO.

Michelle Williams, Best Actress, My Week With Marilyn: “I am so grateful to be acknowledged by the Academy for my work, which was made possible by the support of our director Simon Curtis and the camaraderie of a terrific ensemble of actors—a special congratulations to Kenneth Branagh—and the fearless Harvey Weinstein. This role has been the challenge and privilege of a lifetime. I would like to think that the recognition our film has received by the Academy is a testament to Marilyn’s legacy.”
Kenneth Branagh, Best Supporting Actor, My Week With Marilyn: “It was a rare honor to play Sir Laurence Olivier. To be recognized by the Academy for doing so is overwhelming. I’m absolutely thrilled.”

Oscar photo-op

Oscar nominated Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh

Belfast-born Kenneth Branagh was nominated in the Best Supporting Actor Oscar category for My Week with Marilyn. Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar nod comes after his BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for his portrayal of Laurence Olivier in My Week With Marilyn. This tells the story of the creen icon’s arrival in Britain to film The Prince and the Showgirl and of the fraught relationship between the American actress and the British stage star.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his Blackberry

Can you be a feminist and unconditional support to her husband? Anne Sinclair responds strongly to Anne-Cécile Sarfati, deputy editor of ELLE, who conducted the interview: “unconditional support does not exist. The argument is if we decided to support. Nobody knows what happens in the privacy of couples and I deny anyone the right to judge mine. I feel free of my decisions, my actions, I decided my life independently. “

Throughout the series DSK, women, including feminists, have criticized her attitude. “What women have felt disappointed with me, I am sorry to say, but that’s their problem! “Says the wife of former IMF chief. “I do not understand them, they express the views and feelings, but I listen to the idea that one can judge the attitude of someone in his private life completely foreign to me.” She added:” I claim my choices. That people take ownership of my life unbearable “Faced with the emotion and sometimes indignation, caused by the affair in France, Anne Sinclair responded:” I understand that this case has caused a stir and that ‘it is treated extensively. But I find that on this occasion all the levees that protected privacy have been breached. ” from Elle in French

M. K Spell

L V Waters

Waters had several stints in jail in Indian River County and was incarcerated three times by the Florida Department of Corrections: from September 2002 to December 2003; August 2007 to March 2008; and March 2009 to August 2010.

In an application for a public defender filed in Williams County, N.D., Waters listed his home address as Parachute, Colo., where court records also show he had a driver’s license. He listed two children, ages 5 and 15, and said he was not married.
Michael Keith Spell, 22, and 47-year-old Lester Vann Waters are charged in Montana with aggravated kidnapping, a felony charge that carries the death penalty in that state, in connection with the Jan. 7 disappearance of teacher Sherry Arnold of Sidney enter a Williams County courtroom Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012 for a preliminary extradition hearing in Williston, N.D.

Michael Keith Spell

Accused Kidnapper

Pastors from Sidney Montana for Sherry Arnold at gym, recited the Lord's Prayer

Law enforcement officials are requesting that North Dakota property owners in Williams County, McKenzie County, Mountrail County, and those in extreme northeastern Montana check shelter belts and vacant farmsteads on their land for disturbed soil.

The surrounding grassy area may also appear to be matted. A shelter belt is a line of trees that protects soil from the wind. Ms. Arnold’s body may be buried in a shelter belt that contains mature or rotted trees. Mrs Arnold, 43, disappeared while on an run along a two-lane, farm-to-market route with mostly local traffic and some tractor-trailers,.a truck route on the edge of the oil boom town in northeast Montana that has about 5,500 residents.
Sidney — a town of about 5,000 only 10 miles from the border with North Dakota — is changing as people pour in from out of town, chasing the money brought by the Bakken oil boom.
He’s seen it before — the last time there was an oil boom in the 1980s.
“We have a lot of activity now at this part of the state,” DiFonzo said. “A lot of out-of-state people are here to work, and locals don’t know them or recognize them.”
The influx has increased crime, and DiFonzo said officers are responding to more bar fights, domestic violence and drunken driving.
“We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
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The Town of Parachute is a Statutory Town in Garfield County, Colorado, United States. The population was 1,006 at the 2000 census. they had to either charge the two men being questioned (and in custody) or to let them go no later than Sunday night, as it would have completed the 72-hour window allotted them for questioning without bringing charges.

The two men were charged.

Riders from Parachute, Colorado