Business

Corzine’s financial my$tery

It’s been a long while now since that frightful Halloween when MF Global filed the eighth-largest bankruptcy in the history of the United States. Too long a time if you are an MF customer and can’t get access or answers to what happen to your money.

Certain individuals at MF Global breached the sacrosanctity of segregated customer accounts to cover for liquidity shortfalls induced from extremely leveraged bets gone extremely bad, reportedly made by CEO Jon Corzine and his confidants.

Which brings us to a primary point in the MF Global debacle: Exactly where were Jon Corzine’s millions held while his firm was leveraging up 40-to-1? And for that matter, where were his lieutenants’ funds held? Unfortunately, those answers are not forthcoming from any of the parties.

It is almost unanimously mandated by Wall Street that officers of brokerage firms keep their investment accounts at the firm where they work. This is done for compliance reasons.

If Corzine and his inner cadre of lieutenants had their millions at MF Global, were their accounts breached as well?

Are they being treated identically to other MF Global account holders in terms of the massive amounts of their missing money and the lack of access to what’s rightfully theirs?

If Corzine et al. didn’t keep the vast majority of their money at MF Global, then why not?

It’s been reported that a mere two weeks before filing for bankruptcy, while the skies were darkening for MF Global due to the European tidal wave, Corzine and his wife were apparently chateau shopping in the south of France, no less.

While both Corzine and his wife are extremely wealthy people, chateau shopping just 15 days before filing this country’s eighth-largest bankruptcy are not the actions of a man with good analytical skills or who is overly concerned about the fate of his teetering financial empire — unless his own money isn’t at risk.