An internal “CaseWorks” study from Columbia University’s prestigious business school obtained by The Post teaches its students an important lesson: Make millions of dollars while promoting a host of busted Chinese companies — even as investors who held the shares lose hundreds of millions — and you can be written up as an American success story.
That’s exactly what Columbia Business School’s Kravis Professor Paul Ingram did when he co-authored a 23-page piece with Benjamin Wey, a controversial promoter of Chinese shares listed in the US.
Oddly, the document fails to mention the well-publicized January 2012 FBI raid on Wey’s offices, as part of what a bureau spokesman called “an ongoing investigation.”
For the students who pay nearly $61,000 in tuition, here’s what Ingram’s class teaches them:
- Doing deals in China can make you very rich. We know this because in the second sentence, Wey discusses driving his Maserati home while everyone else takes the subway.
- Being an honest broker between the differing business cultures in China and the US gets results with less acrimony and can help you get corporate finance assignments to sell shares in the US. Not mentioned: Of the nine deals Wey’s New York Global Group did, four have been delisted, four trade for pennies in the pink sheets and one went private.
- It’s important to make connections to Wall Street’s elite “whales,” like Fredrick Rittereiser, the former chief of Instinet, an early electronic stock-trading rival to the New York Stock Exchange. Not brought up: The company Rittereiser was heading when Wey cold-called him in the mid 1990s, Ashton Technology Group, collapsed in 2002 after losing lawsuits against message-board posters.
Wey got Rittereiser onto the board of AgFeed Industries, a Chinese pork producer Wey brought to the US. It is now bankrupt and delisted.
And in late August, the SEC filed a Wells Notice claiming it is likely to file charges against “certain current or former officers” for violation of anti-fraud provisions.
What does Columbia’s legendary business school have to say for itself?
“This is a private, non-empirical document that was for educational purposes solely and which did not involve research from Professor Ingram. He makes no assertions that it is accurate or even true,” a spokesperson wrote.