Bill Gates and former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan are among the friends of Rajat Gupta who have penned letters to Judge Jed Rakoff seeking leniency when the convicted insider trader is sentenced later this month.
A lobbying group backed by Elliott Management’s Paul Singer enlisted the American Agriculture Movement, the American Read More
Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, is leading an inquiry into JPMorgan losses on credit derivatives bets associated with the trader known as the London Whale. Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, says that the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on investigations, which Senator Levin chairs, is seeking testimony from employees in the bank’s chief investment office. Read More
These are precarious times for the employees of financial firms, what with regulators elbowing each other over the biggest and best cases, looming criminal charges arising from the Justice Department’s Libor investigation, to say nothing of the SEC’s willingness to target middle managers (i.e. Brian Stoker), criminal investigations into JPMorgan’s trading losses, recent verdicts in municipal bond bid-rigging cases, etc. Point being, there’s plenty to worry about that. Read More
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
And Bruno Iksil, a.k.a. the London Whale, a.k.a. Voldemort, is lawyering up, and in comprehensive fashion: According to Reuters, Mr. Iksil has hired attorneys in France, New York and Washington D.C. Ina Drew, Achilles Macris, Javier Martin-Artajo, Peter Weiland or Irvin Goldman—all former employees of JPMorgan’s chief investment office—have also retained legal representation. Well, if Read More
British lawmakers published results of their investigation into Barclays efforts to manipulate Libor and other interbank lending rates. They were less than happy with cooperation provided by former CEO Bob Diamond.
Deutsche Bank is one of four European lenders being investigated by U.S. authorities for possible violations involving oil-trading and Iran, a source told Bloomberg. Read More
Faceplant: UBS saw profit fall 58 percent in the second quarter. The firm wasn’t helped by a $356 million loss connected to Facebook’s initial public offering, in which technical glitches at Nasdaq caused UBS to buy more shares than its clients had ordered. “We will take appropriate legal action against Nasdaq to address Read More
Daily Libor: Royal Bank of Scotland chief executive officer Stephen Hester told The Guardian that ”RBS is one of the banks tied up in Libor. We’ll have our day in that particular spotlight as well.” At least two banks have joined Deutsche Bank in cooperating with European investigations into the rigging of Read More
Geithner visits Congress: Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner will testify before the House Financial Services Committee today about the rate-rigging scandal, where it figures he’ll be asked why the New York Fed failed to alert other regulators when a Barclays employee told the Fed that the bank was rigging Libor in April 2008. (Mr. Read More
Your papers, please: Texas Republican Randy Neugebauer of the House Financial Services committee asked the New York Fed for all of its communications pertaining to Libor with the 16 banks under investigation for manipulating interbank lending rates dated between August 2007 and July of this year.
Hey, big boy: Several groups of traders Read More
