Two top executives at failed MF Global plan to tell a Senate committee Tuesday they do not know where customer money missing from the collapsed firm is located.
As much as $1.2 billion in client funds may be unaccounted for after the eighth-largest bankruptcy in US history. That’s according to a trustee overseeing distribution of customer money for the firm.
“I do not know why these funds cannot be accounted for, but based on the fact that no shortfalls had been reported to me previously, it appears that any irregularities were likely caused by events that occurred shortly before the bankruptcy filing,” said MF Global Chief Financial Officer Henri Steenkamp in testimony obtained by MarketWatch.
Steenkamp is scheduled to testify at a hearing Tuesday in the Senate Agriculture Committee about the MF Global failure.
Steenkamp’s comments match those made by Jon Corzine, the former chief of MF Global. Corzine testified before a House Agriculture committee Thursday. Corzine was subpoenaed for the hearing and is scheduled to testify with Steenkamp.
Bradley Abelow, president and chief operating officer of MF Global, is also set to tell lawmakers Tuesday that he doesn’t know where the funds are located. Both Abelow and Steenkamp agreed to testify voluntarily, according to a spokeswoman for the Republican staff of the committee.
“I am deeply troubled by the fact that customer funds are missing, and I can assure you that I share your interest, and the public’s interest, in finding out exactly what happened,” Abelow said in testimony prepared for the hearing Tuesday obtained by MarketWatch. “At this time, however, I do not know the answers to those questions.”
New York-based MF Global filed for bankruptcy protection on Oct. 31 after disclosing sizable exposure to derivatives and other investments related to billions of dollars in European sovereign debt.
Regulators are investigating whether the firm tapped into customer segregated futures accounts for its own proprietary trading. No one at the firm has been charged so far.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and the FBI are conducting investigations into the failure.
(Source: Newscore)
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7 Responses
They probably left it in their other pants pocket.
Don’t you think the SIC etc should be looking? One thing we all know: it didn’t end up in the pockets of the poor & needy. OWS can scream about this & they’d be right.
Sorry, SEC. Although sic seems appropriate!!
These guys are basically full of it. No such thing as not knowing where the money went to. I was the president of a small brokerage firm. We had control of customer funds. Never did we not know where any funds were. That’s a bookkeeping impossibility. At most it can take a day or two to sort through the transactions.
Even if they don’t know, no one will ever believe them. And given that Corzine is a former Democratic governor and United States Senator (who had ambitions to be Secretary of the Treasury, or higher), this means that they’ll be the fact of Wall Street going into the election – which is the last thing Obama would want.
1.2 Billion dollars goes missing and nobody knows; who is he kidding. It is a small scale governmental fraud where trillions go missing and nobody knows
No. 4: Your small brokerage firm was evidently not “too big to fail,” so of course you have no experience being utterly irresponsible and having the confidence that the taxpayers will bail you out if you lose your customers’ money. Your expertise is therefore limited, and you cannot be expected to understand how to lose other people’s money in your custody.