Congress Damns Corzine but Lets Him Off the Hook - Bloomberg
Congress Damns Corzine but Lets Him Off the Hook - Bloomberg
Perhaps we should no longer be surprised by the arrogance of Wall Street executives. Still, the level of hubris and bullying displayed by Jon Corzine during his 19-month tenure as chairman and chief executive officer of MF Global Holdings Ltd. (MFGLQ) — as described in a recent congressional report about the company’s 2011 collapse — stands out for sheer offensiveness.
The 97-page report prepared by the staff for Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee panel on oversight and investigation pulls no punches when it comes to blaming Corzine for the MF Global disaster, which wiped out thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of customers’ and creditors’ money. “Jon Corzine caused MF Global’s bankruptcy and put customer funds at risk,” the report concludes flatly.
And the gory details strewn throughout the elegantly written report — some revealed for the first time — show the full extent to which Corzine was out of control. In May 2010, two months after he was hired, Corzine, the former senior partner of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and former governor and U.S. senator from New Jersey, began his pattern of deception.
“The goal here is not to be a prop trader,” the report claims Corzine said. “I don’t think that we will be in a risk taking position, substantial enough to have it be the kind of thing that the rating agencies would say ‘holy cow, these guys got a different business strategy’ than what we told them we had.”