Labels: Milberg Weiss

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Security breaches rise at financial firms

June 13, 2006
Reuters

More than three-quarters of the world's biggest banks and financial firms suffered an external security attack in the past year and half experienced an internal breach, a survey said on Tuesday.

The 2006 Global Security Survey from advisory firm Deloitte said 78 percent of big financial institutions reported a security breach from outside the organisation in the past year, up from 26 percent the previous year.

More than half of the external attacks were attributed to phishing and pharming, such as problems caused by unsolicited email approaches or account information being divulged to a pirate website...

Grasso Took the 5th a Lot During His SEC Deposition

June 15, 2006, 8:30 amPosted by Peter Lattman

Former NYSE chief Dick Grasso invoked his Fifth Amendment right to not answer questions more than 150 times in an SEC deposition looking into potentially improper trading on the NYSE, according to a story in today’s Wall Street Journal. The 2005 deposition, along with one taken earlier this year by Eliot Spitzer’s office regarding Grasso’s pay package, was released to the media yesterday...

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"A recent Ministry of Science study of 180 PhD candidates in China found that 60 percent admitted plagiarizing, and the same percentage admitted paying bribes to get their work published."

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Labels: Financial Services Authority, insider trading, Philippw Jabre

US Congress slams Milberg Weiss indictment

The Lawyer
June 14, 2006

Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman, the US plaintiffs’ firm recently indicted for alleged referral fees, has picked up a powerful ally in the shape of the US Congress. Congress issued a statement slamming the US Department of Justice’s actions in indicting Milberg Weiss.

Signed by four Democrat Congressmen - Charles Rangel, Carolyn McCarthy, Gary Ackerman and Robert Wexler - the statement says: “The unprecedented recent indictment of Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman is a very thinly veiled attempt by the Bush Administration to accomplish by bullying and intimidation what it has not been able to do by law - to end class-action lawsuits, one of the few tools remaining to safeguard the American consumer.”

The statement comes almost a month after Milberg Weiss and name partners David Bershad and Steven Schulman were indicted by Los Angeles federal prosecutors for allegedly paying referral fees to named plaintiffs in shareholder lawsuits.

Labels: Department of Justice, Gary Weiss, Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss

Labels: Enron, money laundering

Another act in Enron show - Filing in massive shareholder suit to take aim at Vinson & Elkins

By TOM FOWLER
June 13, 2006
Houston Chronicle

Just in time for the intermission between last month's convictions and next September's sentencing in the main Enron criminal trial, plaintiffs' attorneys in a massive shareholder lawsuit are preparing a big show of their own. The likely star? Vinson & Elkins, the Houston law firm that was Enron's main outside counsel in the company's final days.

A filing expected in federal court as early as today will contain numerous documents aimed at supporting claims that V&E knew much more about troubles at the company than it has let on and should be liable for some of the billions of dollars in shareholder losses...

...Among the papers are voice mail message transcripts showing that as early as 1999, V&E attorneys questioned the propriety of Enron's former chief financial officer doing business with the company through a side partnership. Also included are notes made by the current head of the firm expressing concerns that legal opinions the firm provided didn't really satisfy accounting rules for millions of dollars in deals...

Labels: Enron, Houston's Clear Thinkers

BWC's financial chief lived in high style - Prison sentence now looms in wake of Gasper's guilty plea

Sunday, June 11, 2006
T.C. Brown and Sandy Theis
Plain Dealer Reporters

Terry Gasper lived the high life on a civil servant's salary. He financed his fine living through the generosity of others - brokers and dealers eager to feast at the in vestment trough he man aged at the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Com pensation. Overflowing with billions of dollars, it is one of the state's largest investment pools.

Those indebted to Gasper for lucrative state investment contracts gave him unfettered access to a luxurious $485,000 condo in the Florida Keys at the Coral Harbour Club, a condo complex with deep-water docks, a heated swimming pool, lighted tennis courts and an oceanfront Tiki hut.

They also wined and dined him at some of the top restaurants in Cleveland and Columbus. A marketer whom prosecutors have yet to identify provided $9,000 in college tuition for his son. And he got a $25,000 investment in a limited partnership and many thousands of dollars in meals, concert and sporting event tickets and other gifts.

But the good life came crashing down around Gasper's ears this past week, when the 59-year-old pleaded guilty in federal and state courts to racketeering, money laundering and ethics violations. Prosecutors estimate that Gasper's quid pro quo manner of doling out state investment business has cost taxpayers $20 million to $50 million...

Labels: money laundering

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Labels: Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss

Labels: Melvyn Weiss, Milberg Weiss

'Enron of Spain' Fallout Ripples Into U.S. Markets

June 07, 2006
By Richard Behar

Some experts are calling it the "Enron of Spain," the biggest financial scam that country has ever known. A Spanish prosecutor has warned it might have “grave repercussions for the Spanish economy.” And now, the shock waves are rippling into U.S. markets, where the full effects are still unknown.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission launched an investigation of a relatively obscure New York stamp and coin trading firm called the Escala Group, a company that has morphed in just three years into the third-largest conglomerate in the collectibles industry, after Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Trading in the stock of Escala — which has estimated annual revenues of $3 billion — reached a high of $35 in February on the NASDAQ stock exchange, but has slid over the past two weeks to around $7.50 – as the company has been battered by a dozen class-action lawsuits filed in the U.S., alleging fraud.

Escala insists it is innocent of wrongdoing, and notes that no authority has stated otherwise.

The SEC did not reveal the reasons for its probe, but it undoubtedly has much to do with the Spanish scandal, where some 350,000 working and middle-class investors in collectible stamps in Spain and Portugal may have lost billions of dollars in savings...

Labels: Enron

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The Amateur Sleuth Who Gave the Archives a Red Face

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 8, 2006; A21

The scandal over missing documents that rocked the National Archives this spring came to light not because of the digging of an investigative reporter or a timely leak by a concerned federal insider. Instead it was Matthew M. Aid, an amateur researcher and historian, who figured out that for at least six years the CIA and the Air Force had been withdrawing thousands of records from the public shelves -- and that Archives officials had helped cover up their efforts.

"I'm a 48-year-old part-time historian who just accidentally stumbled onto something," Aid said in a recent interview. "I like things neat. And when I started getting the runaround from people at the Archives about why this stuff wasn't available, that's when I started getting angry. . . . They would not give me an explanation. Alarm bells started going off when that happened."

Aid "stumbled" onto something that everyone else missed in part because he knows the territory so well. By profession, the native New Yorker is a corporate investigator, a digger for hire who has worked for several firms that specialize in rounding up information for lawsuits or corporate takeover bids. He once told a prospective boss that he "loved paper more than life itself." But Aid's passion is history -- more specifically, the history of the U.S. intelligence community. "Basically, I've spent my entire adult career in secrets, in one form or another," he said.

Aid's love for the subject is obsessive, so much so that he spends most of his free time and all of his vacations at the National Archives' facility in College Park. There, he trolls through thousands of old government memos, reports, cables and other documents on such far-flung subjects as CIA operations in Iran in the 1950s, Air Force intelligence reports from World War II and State Department assessments of agrarian reform in Guatemala.

"Countless generations of girlfriends called this the busman's holiday. I have no idea how to take a normal vacation," said Aid, who is single. "Any spare time I have, I run up to the National Archives to do historical research. . . . I love history because it's like solving a puzzle."

For 20 years Aid has been cobbling together many little pieces of a particular puzzle. He is working on a comprehensive history of the National Security Agency, whose initials -- NSA -- are jokingly said to stand for "No Such Agency." Aid, a former Russian linguist for the NSA and the Air Force, began the project in 1986, largely because a fellow researcher bet him he could not do it. He writes from 4 to 9 a.m. every weekday, then begins his day job for a British company he declines to name because, he said, his employer would not like the publicity.

Two decades in, Aid said that he has completed the first of three volumes on the NSA and that the book is at a publisher. He hopes it will hit bookstores next year. He did not get an advance for writing the book and has not made a dime from his years of research. "I'm doing this for love -- or insanity," Aid said. "It's not about money. It literally has become an obsession. I'm dying to know how it's all going to end myself."

Aid has looked through piles and piles of documents, many of them once classified top secret. He has 22 filing cabinets in his Northwest Washington apartment filled with copies of declassified material, much of it from the National Archives. He has read some documents two or three times, and routinely will ask Archives staff to pull papers he perused 10 years ago to refresh his memory or see if he can spot anything new.

It was while revisiting (or trying to) some Cold War-era State Department records last August that Aid realized documents he had seen before -- indeed, he had copies of some at home -- were no longer on the Archives shelves. He inquired about it but was given no explanation. He let it go for a while, but by October, after several other files had gone missing, he demanded answers.

"I had been on a slow burn for months at this point," Aid said. "None of the reference librarians would tell me anything. . . . They knew I was suspicious about something, but they clearly had been ordered not to talk about it."

Finally, someone took him aside and told him the CIA and other agencies had been pulling files since 1999. Aid took the matter to friends at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library. Other researchers also had started noticing irregularities, and together they sent a letter to the Archives requesting a meeting.

At the meeting, held at the end of January, Archives officials "admitted everything," Aid said. "They said, 'Yes, there has been a reclassification program going on here.' " The next month, the New York Times broke the story. Allen Weinstein, the head of the Archives, soon announced a moratorium on reclassification while the agency undertook an audit of the withdrawn documents.

Completed in April, the audit found that at least 25,515 records had been removed by five agencies, including the CIA, Air Force, Energy Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Archives itself, which had agreed to keep the program secret.

Although the agencies said the documents were improperly declassified in the first place, Weinstein announced that more than a third of them should never have been removed. Auditors also found that the CIA withdrew a "considerable number" of records it knew should be unclassified "in order to obfuscate" other records it was trying to protect. Weinstein announced new procedures to ensure that withdrawals of records were rare and that the public will be notified when that occurs.

Timothy Naftali, a University of Virginia history professor who in October will become the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, said Aid had performed "a great service" in exposing the reclassification program.

"His work helps all of us fight against the culture of secrecy in Washington today. We don't have enough watchdogs," Naftali said. Aid applauded the audit and the policy changes. But he said the intelligence agencies are still dragging their feet when it comes to declassifying records.

"This entire experience has been an eye-opener for me," Aid said. "What's at the National Archives, I thought, was sacrosanct. It had nothing to do with the secrecy that was prevalent in Washington and I read about in the newspapers. So this has come as a huge shock for me. . . . You don't stand up and take notice until it has a direct impact on you. I'm taking it very personally."

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