Tag Archives: Madoff

Internal Oversight, the SEC and BigLaw

As the US Army engages in introspection with respect to its internal oversight in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre and the SEC does the same after the Madoff disaster, the government is clearly announcing that it will require no less of private sector supervisors than it will of itself. In a recent example, the SEC is compelling the former general counsel and CEO of San Francisco investment bank Merriman Curhan Ford to pay for its failure to properly supervise David “Scott” Cacchione, who pleaded guilty to fraud in March for emailing customer accounts to William “Boots” Del Biaggio III in connection with a scheme to scam banks out of $50 million worth of loans: “When you find major frauds at a broker dealer like this, you’re going to naturally look at ‘Where is the supervision?'” said Michael Dicke, the enforcement director of the San Francisco office.

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Where Were the Lawyers?

While our economy crumbles, the American public observes like lemmings as the Wall Street criminals who executed the greatest financial fraud in history add insult to our collective injury by continuing to openly steal billions. Only now, instead of conning the world into believing that their excrement is some sort of sophisticated securities derivative too complex for non-Streeters to comprehend, they are referring to their cash grab as “bonuses.” Relatively insignificant sociopaths like Bernie Madoff can only aspire to sit at the desks of these miscreants whose greed may still prove monumental enough to bring us all to ruin. We at Hanover Legal are certainly not the first to ask whether and when members of our legal community should have recognized and tried to put a stop to the epic Wall Street slight of hand. However, we viewed our function as limited to servicing the financiers to whatever extent we were paid to do so, and as long as Moody’s and S&P were signing off on these transactions with their highest ratings, who were we to raise an eyebrow?

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