New Zealand’s Cathy Odgers Bungles Her Resignation From Pacific Fiduciaries
There’s no end in sight to Odgers’ inept duplicity: she can’t even tell the truth about her resignation from Pacific Fiduciaries
Read more...Category Archives: Ridiculously obvious scams
KKR’s Botched Document Cover-Up Reveals Washington Public Pension Fund Cronyism
As we’ve been examining private equity abuses, readers have been incredulous that investors have put up with one-sided, deliberately vague, complex, and/or obfuscatory contracts, unreasonable demands for secrecy, and lack of access to critically important information, such as the financial statements of the portfolio companies that they own. This failure of investors to protect their own interest is particularly troubling given that so many are fiduciaries.
We have another example of this sort of conduct that comes out of an important story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Private equity kingpin KKR made what amounted to an admission of guilt by rebating fees that the SEC had found were improperly charged, meaning stolen from the limited partners. We’ve obtained the document that was the foundation of the story and are embedding it at the end of this post. It’s a remarkable example of how cronyistic the relationships are between hapless, captured investors and the general partners who led them by the nose.
We are about to do some document forensic work, so put on your gumshoes!
Read more...Department of Education Sides Against Students to Feather Its Own Bed in For-Profit Corinthian Colleges Debacle
How the Department of Education abused students while earning fees in the denouement of for-profit serial fraudster Corinthian Colleges.
Read more...New Zealand’s Cathy Odgers and Fraud Stock HCI Hamilton: the Denouement
GXG Markets seem to agree with me about the apparent connection between Cathy Odgers’ Pacific Fiduciaries and an exceedingly obvious boiler room fraud, HCI Hamilton.
Read more...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...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.
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