By Kim Velsey 1/14 3:43pm

Stratospheric Sales

Revealed as the owner of a 40th-floor apartment.

Guess Where Barclays’ Disgraced CEO Bob Diamond Spent His Ill-gotten Gains?

The Observer has spent many an afternoon trying to puzzle out the clues in mysterious LLCs. That is, the LLCs that have clues—those that were not registered in Delaware approximately a month before the real estate purchase they were created to shield, named after the building that they are buying property in, and/or in the care of a huge midtown law firm.

But as real estate chronicler Michael Gross proves in a new Newsweek article, promising clues may well be red herrings. When Novgorod LLC purchased a nine-room spread on the 40th floor of 15 Central Park West in 2009, it was assumed that the buyer was one of the many rich Russians who had been sniffing around the building. Quite possibly a rich Russian with some intense personal or professional connection to the city in whose name he’d purchased a $37 million dollar condo. Read More

By Kim Velsey 12/13/12 7:16pm

Getting there

barclays-center

Is Barclays a Fare Jumper When It Comes to Transportation Funding?

The Atlantic Yards certainly knows how to get someone else to pick up the tab. It’s like a friend who always manages to forget his wallet when going out to dinner, or the pal who neglects to pony up her share of the group gift you all went in on together.

First, the project scored $305 million in state and city subsidies via the Empire State Development Corporation, then the arena protested a tax assessment for taxes it didn’t even have to pay (an oversight, it claimed), and now it’s literally getting a free ride on the existing transportation infrastructure—an infrastructure that is ferrying a lot of visitors and cash to Barclays, but that Ratner doesn’t want to help finance. Read More

By Patrick Clark 10/09/12 7:51am

Morning Read

Shareholders’ Lawyers Shine Next to Government; Goldman Sachs Reverses Campaign Giving: Roundup

Max Berger has won billions in settlements in shareholder lawsuits involving Bank of America, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, according to The New York Times. Sometimes viewed in a harsh light, plaintiff’s lawyers are look better when their results are compared to the smaller settlements the government tends to command.

As Read More

By Patrick Clark 6:08am

Morning Read

Former Gov. Pawlenty Puts Snout in Wall Street Trough; Senate Holds HFT Hearings: Roundup

When former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty was campaigning to be the Republican presidential nominee, he told reporters that his “truth message to Wall Street is going to be, ‘Get your snout out of the trough.’” Which, maybe that’s still his truth message? But instead of delivering it as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign, Governor Pawlenty will be speaking it as head of the Financial Services Roundtable, a banking industry lobby.

Somewhere, an algorithm read the coverage of yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on high-frequency trading, and figured it will take years for the government to hammer out reforms to fix market structure issues. Read More

By Patrick Clark 8/31/12 12:28pm

sloppy seconds

Richard-Fuld-006

Again With the Curse of Dick Fuld: New Barclays, Nomura Brass Signal Retreats From Lehman Acquisitions

A little over a month ago, The Wall Street Journal identified the Curse of Dick Fuld, after the bank bosses who picked assets off the carcass of Lehman Brothers resigned from their posts in unceremonious fashion.

First went Bob Diamond, who snapped up Lehman’s U.S. securities business for Barclays, and who stepped down at the beginning of July after his bank agreed to pay $450 million to settle an investigation into its efforts to manipulate interbank lending rates.

Next fell Nomura chief executive Kenichi Watanabe and chief operating officer Takumi Shibata—who led Nomura’s deal for Lehman’s European and Asian units—amid an insider trading scandal that roiled the Japanese firm.

This week, it seemed, Barclays and Nomura appeared to pare back their respective global ambitions in tandem. Read More

By Patrick Clark 8/31/12 8:47am

Morning Read

Barclays New Boss is Not Like Bob Diamond; JPMorgan Still Working on Whale Probe: Roundup

New Barclays boss Antony Jenkins is the only CEO of a global universal bank without a background in investment banking, and according to Bloomberg, the low-profile retail banker is everything that former CEO Bob Diamond wasn’t. Mr. Jenkins, the first in his family to attend university, started his career at Barclays in 1983 and, after a stint at Citi, returned in 2006. Barclays chairman Marcus Agius, expected to step down in the wake of the Libor scandal now that the task of replacing Mr. Diamond is complete, said that Mr. Jenkins stood out in a competitive field of candidates, according to The New York Times. Former U.K. financial services chief Paul Myners told Bloomberg that there were “probably less than four credible candidates, two of whom I know were approached and turned it down almost without any serious consideration.” Read More