Category Archives: Kleptocracy

Hedge Funds: Top Ten Earners in 2007/2008

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New York Magazine had a piece in 2007 that sorted the hedge-fund elites into categories like “brainiacs” (like James Simon and Jim Chanos) and “bad boys” (like Daniel Loeb).

The category “Top dogs” (that is, the very best hedgies) includes SAC Capital Advisers/Steven Cohen ($12 b); Cerberus Capital/Stephen Feinberg ($19.5 b); Appaloosa Mgt/David Tepper ($5.3 b); ESL/Eddie Lampert ($18 b); Citadel Investment Group/Kenneth Griffin ($13.5 b); Manhattan/Michael Novogratz ($4.6b).

[Note: the figures were as of 2007].

This is the short list of the managers whom the industry thinks are top dogs, and of these six, one (Feinberg) is directly connected to Drexel Burnham Lambert, convicted junk bond financier Michael Milken’s bank; another (Cohen) is connected indirectly to Milken through Gruntal & Co.; and three are alumni of Goldman Sachs(Tepper, Lampert, Novogratz).

Five out of six and that’s just a cursory examination. I didn’t do anything more than google to get that.

And the financial press thinks there are no Sith Lords?

A more conventional ranking is found below: Continue reading →

Xmarks’ Top 20 Corruption Sites List Includes Deep Capture

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I just happened to notice this ranking of the most popular corruption sites and thought I’d post it as more evidence that the campaign against naked short selling isn’t some marginal “freak” show, as some of the financial blogs have tried to claim it is. Continue reading →

Steve Cohen, Third Biggest Owner of Sotheby’s In 2009 (Corrected)

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Modern Art Obsession has a post from April 2009 (see below) about Steve Cohen exhibiting a collection of his art at Sotheby’s, (where he  is the third largest owner). The exhibition ran exactly at the same time as Sotheby´s Spring Modern and Contemporary Auction. The Cohen art was not for sale.

Quote:

“So.. we guess there are other ways to dump an art collection skin a cat.

Hmmm… Maybe the page from the Billionaire Art Opportunist Collector playbook could be :

  • Step 1.. Buy lots of Art, push prices way up, and tell everyone who’ll listenin the media you’re a wise long term buyer.
  • (Photo #1, Richard Prince, “Graduate Nurse, 2002”,Ink jet print and acrylic on canvas,89 in x 52 in.   FYI… A description from Sotheby’s.. “This work is one of the best paintings Prince ever made, particularly because of its monumental scale and the rich, painterly quality of the brushstrokes”)
  • Step 2.. Buy an art auction house (or a Whopping controlling interest in one),
  • Step 3.. Stage a show of the great works having auction house experts tout your collection..
  • Step 4..Tell everyone these art works, on proud display, are not for sale
  • Step 5… Wait for someone stupid enough to say.. I wish I could have a collection like the one by this well known art collector, which just happens to be on display in the auction house.
  • Step 6.. To be determined…. Hmm.. possibly.. Cash out..??

Note: Cohen’s SAC Capital amassed its position in Sotheby’s in the 6 months upto March 31, 2009, and  Sotheby’s shares doubled by June 2009 from a low in February.

Correction (January 7, 1020):  Cohen sold his stake in June:

The fund acquired its Sotheby’s stake between September and April, a period in which the auction house’s stock was battered by the financial crisis and a shrinking art market. The share price was below $10 for much of that period, down from a high of $61.40 at the end of the boom. This spring, the stock rebounded somewhat –­ it was $14.48 a share on June 30­, so SAC’s sale of its roughly four million shares was likely to have netted several million dollars

Lazard-Freres Insider Trading Bust

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I missed these arrests from back in mid-December:

“U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges against a former Lazard Freres banker on Wednesday for alleged insider trading that earned him and others $500,000 in illegal profits.

The trading involved some of the highest profile deals during the leveraged buyout boom of 2005 to 2007, including the buyout of TXU Corp, as it was formerly known, for $44 billion, including debt.

The charges were brought against Adnan Zaman, a former vice president at Lazard Freres, in federal court in San Francisco.

Financial regulators also filed civil charges against him and Vinayak Gowrish, a former associate at private equity firm TPG Capital, saying the one-time fraternity brothers stole confidential stock tips and then passed them on to friends. In return, the men received cash kickbacks.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission settled the civil case with Zaman, who agreed to return $78,456 in ill-gotten gains and to be permanently barred from associating with any financial broker or dealer.

The SEC said that Gowrish and Zaman, friends since high school, tipped two friends, Pascal Vaghar and Sameer Khoury. Vaghar and Khoury also settled with the SEC.”

More at Reuters.

My Comments

Is it just me, or does there seem to be an awfully high number of desis (Hindi for home-boy).

What´s with these guys?

As a fellow desi, I have to hang my head. World-class education, world-class jobs, better than world-class salaries…and a world-class racket.

Warren Buffett To Promote Paulson Book

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Now, we don´t want to read too much into this announcement, but, really, promoting Paulson´s book? What´s Buffett going to say?

I really really like that chapter where Hank had to take over the US government.…you know, after he pushed Bear Stearns and Lehman over with the help of his  hedge-fund buddies…and all but nationalized housing.

Or

Gee, Hank´s into that cap-and-trade collectivist boondoggle that just got outed as a total rip-off  and a fraud made up by climate change fanatics but hey, give the guy a break, will ya? We´re all capitalists here…..you know, like, state capitalists..wazza big deal?

Or

Yeah, I know. Vanity Fair, that bastion of free markets and free minds, already did its bit for Hank´s place in history when it got down on its knees and..um.. blew…up.. the guy into some kind of I´m-taking-on-the-slings-and-arrows-for-the-greater-good-profile-in-courage long before me, and yeah, Bethany  did her bit for Hank too.. but every little effort counts…

I´ve had my doubts about Buffett´s involvement in the bail-out.

This doesn´t make them go away…

Secretive Steve Cohen On Talk Show Discussing Relationship With Ex—

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I’d been avoiding mentioning the by-now famous clip of Steve Cohen on a talk show back in 1992, because it seems like a low blow. I mean, hit the guy over the head on insider trading, but don’t worm around in the trash can for dirt on him. Of course, he did put himself on the show…

But, either way, there’s one angle that is relevant.

If you’re billed as the most secretive guy in the hedge world, presumably because you’re a reclusive, crowd-shy financial genius, what does it say that you once got onto a TV show called Cristina of none-too-distinguished caliber to discuss intimate details of your personal life?

Hmm. That’d hardly what I call shrinking violet material.

Here, sans video (because we don’t drag people’s families in the mud on this blog) is the lowdown at New York Magazine:

“Shortly after they were married in 1992, Steve Cohen, the notoriously secretive hedge-fund manager at SAC Capital, and his second wife, Alex, went on the short-lived English-language version of the popular talk show Christina. The episode? “He Acts Like Her Husband!” The subject discussed? Steve’s too-close relationship with his ex-wife, Patricia Cohen, who recently filed a $300 million lawsuit against him.”

Think about that for a moment.

Psychologically, that doesn’t make any sense for a reclusive genius…

But, just suppose, what you have here is not a shy geeky genius (or maybe, I should qualify that – not solely a shy geeky genius) but a guy who was quite at home at a shady broker called Gruntal & Co. in the 1980s –  a broker that had ties to the Russian mob and to a whole set of players to whom ‘reclusive’ and ‘shy’ are the last words you’d apply. Just suppose what you have here is a guy who was a player in that crowd….making his way any way he could. And just suppose, that past is why he keeps a low profile…

Just suppose.

It’s at least a distinct possibility.

But what’s more like a high probability is that anyone who puts out an article on Steve Cohen like this one or this one by John Carney has lost quite a bit of his credibility on Steven Cohen and on a few things closely related like, say, insider trading…or naked shorting….

Carney’s explanation why Steven Cohen can have done no wrong? A SAC trader told him so. That’s why.

“The trader described the enormous, football field sized trading floor at SAC as “the cleanest in the biz.”

A SAC trader says SAC is 100 percent clean. Because?

Well, that part of it isn’t mentioned in the article, although a lot of other stuff which sure as heck sounds super close to insider trading is.

“When I was there, we put tons of pressure on our brokers to make sure they gave us any information they had fast and first,“

And what was that John Carney was calling Matt Taibbi only a couple of months ago?

Naive?

Janet Tavakoli Faces Off With Goldman On AIG CDOs

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Janet Tavakoli in Market Watch

“Earlier, Goldman denied it could have known this was a problem, yet acknowledged I had warned about the grave risks at the time. If Goldman wants to stick to its story that it didn’t know the gun was loaded, then it is not in the public interest to rely on Goldman’s opinion about the greater risk it now poses to the global markets.

Goldman excuses its participation by saying its counterparties were sophisticated and had the resources to do their own research. This is a fair point if Goldman were defending itself in a lawsuit with a sophisticated investor trying to recover damages. It is not a valid point when discussing public funds that were used to bail out AIG, Goldman, and Goldman’s “customers.”

Goldman claims the portfolios were fully disclosed to its customers. Yet at the time of the AIG bailout, Goldman did not disclose the nature of its trades with AIG, and Goldman did not disclose these portfolios to the U.S. public. If it had, the public might have balked at the bailout.

The public is an unwilling majority owner in AIG, and public money was funneled directly to Goldman Sachs as a result of suspect activity. The circumstances of AIG’s crisis were extraordinary and without precedent. I maintain that the public is owed reparations, and it would be fair to make all of AIG’s counterparties buy back the CDOs at full price, and they can keep the discounted value themselves.”

Reverse Midas: SAC Spin-Offs Fail Even When They Succeed

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Reading this report about SAC Capital by Reuters, I was struck by a few things.

But first, here’s the chronology (skip below for my argument):

  • 1980s: Steven Cohen allegedly involved in insider trading at Gruntal
  • 1999-2004, 2004-2007, 2007-2009: Insider trading at Spherix (ex-SAC trader Richard Lee’s own firm); and possibly at Stratix (founded by Goodman and Grodin in 2004, also ex-SAC traders, with SAC as a sizable investor); and (again, possibly) at SAC itself, by Richard Lee and Ali Far, also an alum of SAC.
  • 2006: SEC investigates SAC and two other firms for manipulation of Fairfax Financial stock. Investigation dropped in 2007
  • 2007-2009: Agent Kang investigates 20 hedge funds for insider trading
  • 2007: SEC investigates SAC over Andrew Tong’s sex charges. Case sealed in 2008. Reopened in Nov. 2009, this time focusing on insider trading. About this time, Richard Grodin’s and Ian Goodman’s firm Stratix (where Lee and Far worked) closes. Grodin then begins Quadrum, which also closes
  • Oct-Nov 2009: Galleon Group charged by Kang with insider trading and 14 traders arrested, including former SAC traders, Richard Lee and Ali Far
  • Nov-Dec 2009: Cohen’s ex-wife alleges insider trading when Cohen was at Gruntal & Co. in the 1980s
  • Dec. 2009: Ex-SAC trader and founder of Stratix Richard Grodin subpoenaed

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Now that you have that in mind, here are the things that struck me:

1. The high number of SAC traders who seem to have gone off into their own businesses.

You’d think with all that money and the fund’s record as the most consistently successful in the business (only one bad year on record), their traders would stay forever. Quite the opposite.  People seem to have been leaving all the time to form their own businesses.

But SAC was also said to be a very tough environment. You produced, or you left.

So maybe that’s why Lee and Far, Grodin and Goodman, all left to found their own firms?
Could be. But I’m not convinced.

2. None of the spin-off firms seems to have been very successful.

Why not? Why couldn’t these hot-shot traders make money on their own?

The Reuters piece suggests that perhaps the SAC experience didn’t foster business ability. And that perhaps SAC traders flounder without SAC’s huge supporting cast.

But those things are likely to be true of other firms as well, not solely SAC.

Still not convinced.

Furthermore, consider this.

3. A spin-off fund that didn’t get money from Cohen ended up quite successful:

“Healthcor, a healthcare industry focused fund, had raised $3.2 billion by June 2009 since launching four years ago. The fund returned 25 percent in 2006, 18 percent in 2007, and was up 4 percent last year, when the average hedge fund lost 19 percent. In the first 10 months of 2009, Healthcor was up 7 percent.

Healthcor, founded by Arthur Cohen and Joseph Healey, opened without any financial support from SAC. In fact, soon after Cohen and Healey struck out on their own, SAC sued the pair, accusing them of breaching their employment contracts. The matter ultimately was settled. (Healthcor’s Cohen is not related to SAC’s Cohen).”

4. Even spin-offs that were doing well were shut down.

When Stratix started in 2004, it had $60 million given to it by SAC. When it shut down, in 2007, it was up 17% and had $530 million under management. Yet it shut down. Why did it shut down? Those numbers sound pretty good.

Another spin-off, Fontana Capital, started out in 2005 with $50 million of SAC money. It grew to $325 million by 2006.  But sometime in 2007, Cohen pulled out all his money. And in 2009, Fontana was down to $16.1 million, despite being down only 7.69%, compared to the average S&P Financial index loss of 57%. Again, that sounds like it wasn’t doing all that bad.

Reuters quotes someone familiar with the record of ex-SAC traders:

“So many of the ex-SAC people seem to have this model where they attract you with fantastic returns in the first year but in year two or three or four you get annihilated,” said a person who is familiar with several former SAC employees’ records.

Shades of Bernie Madoff….

Someone need to look closely at what happened to the money at these firms…

SEC Subpoenas Former SAC Trader Grodin

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El Economista carries this Reuters report, dating from yesterday, Dec. 24, on the SEC´s subpoena of a former manager at Steven Cohen´s SAC Capital hedge-fund:

“Federal prosecutors in the Galleon Group case have sent a subpoena to a former employee of Steven A. Cohen’s SAC Capital Advisors, a sign that the scope of the problem into the largest hedge-fund insider trading case in history is expanding, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The subpoena seeks trading records from a former SAC hedge fund manager, Richard Grodin, who employed a cooperating witness in the insider trading case announced last week, the Journal said.”

My Comment

It’s all getting pretty tangled, so first let me try to bring some order into the picture.

  • I blogged, via Terri Buhl, that hedge-funds are going SAC-remote, deleting their email records and changing their trading positions so they don´t look too similar to Cohen´s, in anticipation of a probe. And now here come the subpoenas.
  • The subpoena to Grodin arises out of the two-year FBI investigation of twenty hedge-funds that became public in October 2009 with the Galleon arrests.
  • The investigation is headed by FBI agent B. J. Kang.
  • Kang also led the probe into the alleged stock manipulation of Fairfax Financial in 2006, in which SAC was one of three hedge-funds involved.
  • The two traders, Richard Choo-Beng Lee, and Ali Far, have admitted that they were involved in insider trading not only at their own fund Spherix, but  going back to 1994. This makes it highly probable that they were also trading illegally at SAC, where Lee worked for about five years.
  • Specifically, the agreement Far and Lee signed with the US Attorney’s Office charges conspiracies to commit insider trading from 2007-2009, from 2004-2007, and from 1999-2004.
  • Galleon chief Raj Rajaratnam’s brother Rengan, who was investigated for insider trading at his firm Sedna, also worked for SAC in 2003.
  • Lee is also going to be testifying about any insider trading he might have done at another firm, Stratix, which was founded by former SAC trader Richard Grodin, and yet another SAC alumnus, Ian Goodman.
  • Stratix, whose investors include SAC (is your head whirling?), shut down in 2007.
  • Then Grodin began another firm, Quadrum, which also shut down (“abruptly”, says Reuters).
  • Also, in November, we had the bizarre revelations of Andrew Tong, who claims he was sodomized and forced into oral sex, cross-dressing, and the ingestion of female hormones (to make him the perfect androgynous trader) by his boss, SAC trader Ping Jiang. Investigated in 2007, the case was dismissed as lacking in substance. The records were sealed, leaving many people feeling that the SEC, as a Harvard paper recently confirmed, tends to go after smaller rather than bigger fish.
  • But in November ’09, the Tong case was opened again and given wide attention on the internet, this time with more attention to Tong’s claims that Ping Jiang forced him to into illegal trading that led to a $3 million loss. The loss was the reason SAC gave for Tong’s firing. But Tong himself claims that that was just an excuse and that the sexual harassment was the real reason. He also claims that Cohen knew what was going on and didn’t care, as long as money was being made. In keeping with the firm’s reputation for secrecy, Cohen made everyone sign confidentiality agreements and kept even top officers in the company out of the loop.
  • These revelations have been followed by new charges made by Cohen´s ex-wife Patricia that her husband had cheated her out of money in their divorce settlement. Some of that money, she now claims, was hidden from the government and came from illegal insider-trading by  Cohen was he was a young trader in the 1980s at Gruntal & Co., a shady brokerage with a history of embezzlement and scandal.

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NOTE:

**If you want to understand the modus operandi of one of these insider trading deals, read Deep Capture´s latest analysis. It displays some of the emails sent by certain hedge-funds that colluded with SAC in the manipulation of the stocks of Fairfax Financial, Jim Chanos´Kynikos and Third Point among them.

The Fairfax investigation (opened in 2006) petered out, but Deep Capture’s email collection nixes any chance that the record can be wiped clean by any of the funds involved (you can also see Bagley´s piece posted at Seeking Alpha).

Den Of Thieves: Hedge-Hogs Go Into SAC-Remote Mode

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Update: Deep Capture indicates that they have some emails proving insider trading, so any attempts to delete files/emails by SAC and other firms might not be any good, since  the files just happen to implicate said firms in…insider trading.

Ah, the web we weave…etc. etc.

Terry Buhl at Hedge Fund-Implode.com reports that residents of hedgefund land are going into SAC-remote mode:

“Funds like Blue Ridge, Greenlight, Third Point, Glenview, and Maverick are cutting back on any contact with King Stevie. When we asked major players such as Jim Chanos and others if they’ve been pinging Stevie about a trade lately, you’ll get a very defensive `no.’ Why? Because word on the street is they all think FBI special agent BJ Kang, who is now dogging Stevie, has the goods to deliver the hammer soon in the form of  an indictment or arrest for insider trading.

Extra measures are being taken to hire data-miners to comb through any and all emails firms and their trading consultants ever sent to anyone at SAC in an attempt to erase them from internet memory. According to traders we talked with, they are even going as far as getting out of trades that might look similar to any of Stevie’s. So it looks like running due diligence on your `SAC risk’ to prove to your investors that you’re clean – like Larry Robbins of Glenview capital just did – is the new `killing it’.”

My Comment:

Just to recap.

*Steven Cohen is the multibillionaire chief of legendary hedge-fund SAC, which sits at the top of the heap among funds. Cohen, famously reclusive, is said to have had only one bad year of trading.

Now he´s having a bad time from the  FBI investigation of the insider-trading case against New York-based hedge-fund Galleon Group, which is proving to have teeth in it.

SAC has a history of elbows-and-knees-style trading practices, according to this 2003 Business Week article.

*The head of Galleon (which once managed $7 billion in assets), Sri Lanka-born Raj Rajaratnam was arrested, along with five others, on October 16  in a $17 million dollar insider-trading case brought by federal prosecutors and the FBI.

(The numbers vary: it´s $20.8 million, according to a later WSJ report, and $25 million in a NY Daily report)

*The case was unusual in that FBI agent B. J. Kang used wire-tapping for the investigation (normally used only in drug-related cases).

*The Galleon arrests were quickly followed by other arrests of  traders, lawyers and hedge-fund managers on November 5, including one Zvi Goffer, who, as the brains of the insider network, was referred to as “the octopussy.” This brought the total number of arrests in the case to 14 (Correction on 12/29: I read 20 elsewhere) and added another $20 million to the fraud, already the biggest in Wall Street history since the days of Ivan Boeksy in the 1980s.

*On December 16, Steven Cohen´s ex-wife Patricia accused him of hiding millions from her and of insider trading in a 1986 merger when Cohen was a young trader at now-defunct broker, Gruntal.

*Indicted on December 17 (December 15, according to one source) by a Federal grand jury  on multiple criminal counts of insider trading and securities fraud,  Rajaratnam  pleaded not guilty. Many of the charges against him carry upto 20 year prison sentences. The trial is expected to take place in the summer of 2010.

*The broker Gruntal has an interesting history, in that it seems to be the place where several of the biggest names on Wall Street (aka some of the most crooked players) crossed paths:

Bernie Madoff, Ezra Merkel (Madoff fund associate), Ivan Boesky (infamous 1980s trader), Michael Milken (junk bond innovator), Carl Icahn (famed and feared corporate raider), Steven Feinberg, ,…and yes, Steven Cohen:

From Deep Capture:

“Another of Madoff’s most important “feeders” was J. Ezra Merkin, who managed the Ariel Fund, which seems to have been designed specifically to raise money for Madoff’s fraudulent investment business. In this regard, the New York attorney general has described “Merkin’s deceit, recklessness, and breaches of fiduciary duty…”

While Merkin was “deceitfully” feeding the Madoff Ponzi, he was also a co-owner, along with Steve Feinberg, of Cerberus Capital Management, a fund named after the mythological three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell.

Previously, Feinberg was a top trader for Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert. After Drexel, Mr. Feinberg moved (on Milken’s recommendation) to a brokerage called Gruntal & Company.”

Gruntal owed its existence to the generous junk bond finance that its parent company, the Home Group, received from Michael Milken. Its options department was founded by Carl Icahn, who later became a “prominent” billionaire owing to the junk bond finance that he received from Michael Milken.

When Icahn left Gruntal, he was replaced by a Milken crony named Ron Aizer, who proceeded, on the recommendation of Milken, to hire two traders.

The first trader hired by Aizer was, according to a reliable source, investigated by the SEC for trading on inside information that he received from Milken’s operation at Drexel Burnham Lambert. This trader is now a “prominent” billionaire and the manager of a well-known hedge fund. The second trader hired by Aizer is now also a “prominent” hedge fund manager, though he is not quite a billionaire. Both of these traders play important roles in the story of Dendreon. Carl Icahn, the founder of Gruntal’s options department, has a cameo role, too.”

There is more, of course, much more to the story, and many more names, including Michael Steinhardt, Marc Rich who was pardoned by Clinton for tax evasion and dealing with Iran against US law, and many others, but that would make this post far too long, so I will send you instead  to this page.…and this...for now.

(Of course, we could ask why hedge-funds with an edge get to be prosecuted, while governments with the biggest edge of all don´t  – but there, we won´t spoil the fun).