John Helmer: The Lure of Foreign Investment in Ukraine – Meet Jaanika Merilo
This is surreal. I suppose you could consider the choice of faceperson to be a form of truth in advertising.
Read more...Category Archives: Ridiculously obvious scams
Republicans Launch Another Wall Street Gimmie: HR 185, the “Tie Regulators in Knots” Act
The Republicans are not wasting any time in their ongoing campaign to make sure nothing stands in the way of Wall Street’s rapacious quest for more profits.
Read more...Google Further Crapifies Search, Exploiting Both Users and Advertisers
Is Google cooking its goose by optimizing search to maximize revenue extraction from advertisers?
Read more...“Summer” Rerun: On the Sanctity of Wall Street Pay
“Sanctity of contract” means something considerably different in practice than the Wall Street money men would have you believe.
Read more...“Summer” Rerun: So Where, Exactly, Did Lehman’s $130 Billion Go?
Dear readers,
We reinstituting a Naked Capitalism feature, the summer rerun. The last time we reprised an archival NC post (aside from a few more recent ones by Matt Stoller) was a July 9, 2009 post that we published again on December 29, 2011.
Interestingly, picking up again from 2009 serves as a reminder of issues that were hot in the aftermath of the crisis that were not addressed adequately, if at all. Here, we discuss the mystery of the magnitude of Lehman’s losses. We pointed out that they are so large and impossible to explain that there had to be accounting fraud, but the bankruptcy overseer had its own reasons not go to there.
Note that this post was published eights months before Anton Valukus released his report on the Lehman bankruptcy, which described the Repo 105 ruse that allowed Lehman to hide over $50 billion of dodgy assets at quarter end and thus not include them in its financial reports.
Read more...Big Investors Rebelling Against Private Equity Fees
In a remarkable and long-overdue change in attitude, institutional investors are starting to tell private equity titans that they think they don’t earn their outsized pay. And that’s before you get to all the grifting they’ve been exposed to be doing on top of that.
The Wall Street Journal described a confrontation at a conference in Paris, with a pension fund manager responsible overseeing private equity investments calling out the unjustifiable level of private equity fees.
Read more...Private Equity Firms Start ‘Fessing Up to Cheating
The Wall Street Journal describes how some private equity firms are attempting to clean up their act by admitting to dubious practices in revised regulatory filings with the SEC.
There’s a wee problem with this approach. Securities law is not like the Catholic Church, where confession and a promise not to sin again buys you redemption.
Read more...Private Equity Titan Blackstone Admits New Normal of Lousy Returns, Proposes Changes to Preserve Its Profits
Private equity continues to make headlines, and not in a good way, despite industry efforts to spin otherwise. The latest shoe to drop is that private equity firms are trying to rewrite some well-established fund terms to allow them to continue to rake in egregious profits even as the returns of most funds have underperformed the stock market.
Read more...University of Southern Maine Becomes “Administration of Southern Maine” as Students Protest Faculty Firings
Earlier this year, it looked as if the University of Southern Maine might become one of the rare places where students and faculty would be able to hold the line against the yet more looting by the bureaucratic classes. The woes besetting the USM are a microcosm of how higher education expenses are escalating as a result of administration feather-bedding and vanity projects. When those prove to be too costly, it’s the faculty and students that bear the brunt of the expense-shedding. As Lambert wrote in March:
Read more...Private Equity Consultants Flounder Over Question About Abusive “Evergreen Fees” at CalPERS Board Meeting
If you want to understand why private equity general partners have gotten away for so long with what the SEC has come perilously close to calling outright embezzlement, along with other serious compliance abuses, you need look no further than the last CalPERS board meeting to get a clue.
Read more...Tech Underbelly: Indentured Servitude and Bonded Labor in the US
A labor collusion pact with the aim of suppressing pay levels among Apple, Google, Microsoft, Pixar, and others, demonstrated that the idea that Silicon Valley plays fairly is an illusion. But even more unsavory abuses occur further down the food chain. H1-B visa workers, who are generally held in low esteem in the US since they compete with Americans, take a risk when they sign up with labor brokers, even seemingly legitimate ones like Tata Consultancy, part of the giant Tata Group in India.
As the NBC video below, part of a joint investigation with the Center for Investigative Reporting, explains, the most abusive recruiters are body shops, who abuse the H1-B program by bringing in technology graduates when the firm in fact has no job lined up. The Indian immigrants are hostage, kept in guest houses where they are told not to go outside until they find work.
Read more...New Zealand’s GT Group in Romania, Moldova and the UK
Shady NZ shell company merchant GT Group’s global footprint just keeps growing, as do its links to the dreamy nonsense that is the “Maharal Network”. In our latest global tour, let’s visit Romania and Moldova first, via Ukraine and New Zealand.
Read more...Invitation Homes Tenant Abuse Shows Incompetence as Well as Malfeasance
Readers may recall that we’ve been writing regularly about the single family home land grab by private equity firms. Blackstone has been far and away the biggest, though its Invitation Homes business. Readers and many institutional investors have been skeptical of PE landlords’ claims that they can manage single family homes cost effectively; it’s hard enough for mom and pop landlords, who often have some relevant maintenance skills, like plumbing or construction, to make a go of it.
But as reports come in from abused tenants, Blackstone looks not only venal in its efforts to shift costs on to tenants, but positively incompetent.
Read more...New Zealand: if Investment Fraud was Typhoid, Cathy Odgers Would be Typhoid Mary, (but Lucy Lawless Would Still be Xena, Warrior Princess)
We offer the latest sightings of the wake left by Cathy Odgers, including two mercifully brief, but searing, personal appearances by the lady herself, and some frauds.
Read more...Occupy the SEC’s New Online Tool Shows How “New Democrats” Sell Out Their Constituents to the Banksters
Not all Democrats sell out to big finance. But those who do exhibit a pattern. With handy charts!
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