Many of us have heard that “accountability” will happen some day. In this article, written back in January 2010, C. Austin Burrell expresses his opinion that the time of these arrests is coming very soon.
He cites a speech by Attorney General Eric Holder in which the latter said that 5,000 indictments have been prepared by the Dept. of Justice, ready to be served against individuals linked to financial-institution fraud, both domestic and foreign. In this article, Burrell goes over the complete list of perpetrators at an institutional level.
Burrell has credibility within his field of corporate finance journalism. He is one of the early, insistent voices for accountability.
by C. Austin Burrell
January 15, 2010
https://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5273/pub_detail.asp
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor C. Austin Burrell is a corporate finance generalist with over 30 years of Wall Street and related experience. He was a senior derivatives specialist and development stage company investment banker for more than 35 years on Wall Street.He is a 1968 Graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and a graduate of the Army’s Finance Officer Advanced Course.
Last week, in a speech given in West Palm Beach, Attorney General Holder announced 5,000 pending indictments by the Department of Justice of individuals linked to financial institution fraud as part of an overall targeting of market manipulators and cheaters across the board. His speech did not specify for the audience the type of targets the DOJ was focusing on, leaving open the most important questions about such an announcement. Who is being indicted by type, and for what kind of specific misconduct?
I have devoted thousands of man hours over 10 years to try and work with and within the legal system of the United States to get its principals to focus on the rape of the American investors stealing literally trillions of dollars, through conduct that could only be identified legally as sedition.
Ten of thousands of securities issued by thousands of legal issuers have been manipulated, counterfeited, and stolen in virtually every form of security bought and sold in every market in the world. I pointed out to many of the responsible government oversight and regulatory officials that various tactics were being strategically employed to launder money for the purpose of stealing securities and evading taxes.
I broke this down into a single memo of eight bullet points for not only these parties but also for numerous journalists, lawyers, victims, government officials and more, with a uniform silence from them with only a handful of exceptions.
The summation of this memo was that criminals both domestic and global were tactically manipulating all forms of assets, engaging in various forms of counterfeiting facilitated by vested public interests, in a huge global conspiracy lined inextricably to all forms of organized crime, again, done strategically to launder U.S. assets into foreign accounts for the purpose of evading all forms of taxes, both legitimate and illegitimate.
The enormous size of the thefts here (in the trillions of dollars) threatens U.S. national security, and global stability. We have seen the dollar implode, retirement accounts savaged, and major institutions brought to their knees and worse, much worse in many cases. These thefts have been implicated in the destruction of investor confidence, and there is no form of security that has not been impacted, from stocks and bonds, currencies, physical and forward commodities, agencies, to commodities, and more.
These same thefts could never have been executed except with the wholesale cooperation of not just hedge funds, and investment banks, but only with the implicit cooperation, support and protection of every form of financial service monopoly involved in trading, clearance and settlement of securities globally in all forms of assets along with the major international money center banks, a pliant press, and a corrupt research industry perforated by criminal interests who pay top price for the purchase or sale of research for securities they specialize in. Oversight provided by our U.S. government branches and agencies hasn’t been deficient, it has been non-existent, a canard by every perspective.
I have been asked to identify some representative names from each category of possible organizational involvement. What I have felt comfortable doing is to specify first the types of organizations involved, the people within those organizations involved, the facilitators of such behavior, beneficiaries of the manipulations, and more as appropriate.
I can start with some of the highest profile hedge funds, including in particular those involved with the most aggressive support of naked short selling of all types of securities, their prime brokers, specific exchange officials, officials of clearance and settlement organizations for all types of securities both domestic and international, organized crime entities domestic and international, supporting regulators at federal agencies and quasi-agencies, publications and journalists, research enterprises, message board operators, paid pumpers, paid bashers and other lower life forms, and more. All of these activities have coordinated their efforts to produce the maximum results possible. No other explanation makes sense but such coordination between the players.
The hedge funds that have to be targeted include the largest and highest profile ones, particularly those with admitted links to short selling syndicates, to paid adversarial negative research reports, to significant recurring short and long term fails to deliver, and to convicted felons, such as the now legendary Anthony (Amir) Elgindy.
Journalistic enterprises would be those who participated in accepting or facilitating communications between known manipulators, who championed illegal short sellers against legitimate companies, who used or permitted use of restricted insider information or false information without broad dissemination, or who acted as pure touts, to facilitate retail buying of companies targeted for short relate bankruptcies, or who induced large scale selling not supported fundamentally, for PIPES financiers, and more.
The next list would be the Prime Brokers and major hedge fund specialty clearance and settlement operations that were known to facilitate illegal trades, front running, insider access to order flow, and related conduct. A final broker list target would include those brokers who specialized in PIPES transactions for customers whose companies’ stocks were manipulated before, during and after the PIPE issuance.
In many of the cases, U.S. government regulators, particularly the SEC and FINRA engaged in conflicted behavior with professional manipulators, who used their conflicted cooperation to obtain protection as confidential informants or cooperating witnesses in ongoing cases. Related to this focus would be the necessity to determine why super-ceding indictments proceeded from virtually none of the cases since the Bermuda Short Sting Cases, with the exception of a few minor indictments related to Anthony Elgindy.
The final focus would need to be on facilitators of stock and bond price manipulation which permitted strategic failures to deliver securities beyond reasonable time frames. This would include the major exchanges, major clearing firms globally, prime brokers, secondary brokers, securities regulators both domestically and internationally, specific publications and journalists, paid bashers, and many more.
Many of these names have been in the open for years involving active organizational defenses of those guilty of malfeasance. Those names have been provided repeatedly to such entities as the Office of the Attorney General of the U.S., to the heads of the SEC, FINRA, DTCC, and more, the US Senate, the House of Representatives, various federal and state task forces investigating financial fraud, the courts, including the Supreme Court, state attorneys aeneral, and more, many more repeatedly over 12 years and three administrations.
Too much has been given to too many about too much fraud for any plausible deniability to remain. The systems markets depend on must be flushed like a rat and vine invested sewer line. Anything short of that will dampen up the system to a continuing boom and bust cycling that will never end, but worse, will likely collapse as frustrated investors flee in droves. Our capital formation process is contaminated enough without stopping this now.
Clean this up before we see the start of outright revolt. Our U.S. government officials must be reminded this isn’t their money. Rather, they are parasites providing services for which the best and the brightest are not suited. Despite prayers to the contrary, the best and the brightest in our government are not always the winners politically. They want this changed as much as the American people do.