Global Articles on what is going on...posted daily

[sandi66]

* DINAR Addendum Rumor: 12/16/10 (Found on One Dinar)

December 16, 2010 05:07 pm ·

Posted in RUMORS ·

Comments Off DINAR Addenum ? Same Inside contact who is into trading in NYC now reporting that cashing in may be as early as Saturday at $3.60. To be showing on the worlds screens as they get to them. Kuwait screen is already showing the dinar at the new rate. There is pressure and urgency to get the shipping going again. Also cautioned that the banking announcement needs to be made to officially shut down the federal reserve.

Announcement can be a notice in the Federal registry with minimal fanfare. This shut down shall be a year long transition into a treasury bank. Cashing in from all vendors will be processed through the Federal Reserve banks.

theiraqidinar.com/category/rumors/

[sandi66]

Ten most corrupt politicians of 2010

December 17, 2010

It's that time of the year when numerous organizations and news outlets publish or announce their "Best of..." or "Worst of..." or "Most important of..." or "Most popular of..." lists. Not to be outdone by the so-called elite media, below is a list from an industrious public-interest group whose sole mission is to investigate and prosecute government corruption wherever it is discovered.

On Thursday, Judicial Watch released its 2010 list of Washington's “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” While there may be some surprises, readers will note that neither political party has a monopoly on political corruption. Special thanks to Judicial Watch's Jill Farrell for providing the Law Enforcement Examiner with a comprehensive list of men and women deserving of recognition for their corrupt ways or illegal activities.

The list, in alphabetical order, includes: Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Rahm Emanuel, Former Obama White House Chief of Staff, Senator John Ensign (R-NV), Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL), President Barack Obama, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY), and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Ethics. But it appears she still needs an ethics lesson. Boxer presided over a year-long investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee into whether two of her Senate colleagues, Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Kent Conrad (D-ND), received preferential treatment from Countrywide Financial as part of the company’s “VIP” program. (Senate ethics rules prohibit members from receiving loan terms not available to the general public.) In fact, according to The Associated Press, during an Ethics Committee hearing Boxer asked “the bulk of the questions.”

However, Boxer failed to mention (or disclose on her official Senate Financial Disclosure documents) that she and her husband have signed no less than seven mortgages with Countrywide. At the time of the hearing, Boxer reportedly indicated she had paid off two Countrywide mortgages, but did not mention the others.

The evidence clearly showed that Dodd and Conrad knew they were receiving preferential treatment despite repeated denials. Yet Boxer’s Senate Ethics Committee allowed Dodd and Conrad to wiggle off the hook with a light admonition that suggested the two Senators should have exercised better judgment. The same, apparently, can be said of the Committee’s own chair, who either neglected to mention or outright lied about her own dealings with the corrupt mortgage company.

Rahm Emanuel, Former Obama White House Chief of Staff didn’t earn the nickname “Rahmbo” for being a mild-mannered shrinking violet. He served as Bill Clinton’s chief money-man at a time when the Clinton campaign was corrupted by foreign money. He defended the “worst of the worst” Clinton scandals, and, in fact, earned his reputation as a ruthless political combatant by fiercely defending President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky investigation. (Notably, Emanuel also served on the board of Freddie Mac when the company was involved in fraudulent activity.)

The bottom line is that when the Clintons’ dirty work needed to be done, Emanuel did it and apparently without question. That didn’t change under Obama. Remember when the Obama White House wanted to manipulate Democratic primaries in 2010?

Emanuel teamed with his then-Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina to allegedly interfere with Senate elections in Pennsylvania and Colorado by offering federal appointments to Rep. Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff. Sestak and Romanoff were not Obama’s favored candidates, so Emanuel and Messina apparently attempted to unlawfully persuade them to abandon their campaigns.

A Judicial Watch complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel on June 15, 2010, tells the story: “As widely reported in the media, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina, on behalf of the Obama Administration, have both used their position and influence as highly placed federal employees to affect the outcome of federal elections in direct violation of the Hatch Act, which states that an employee may not ‘use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.’”

And then, of course, there’s Emanuel’s participation in the Blagojevich scandal.

According to sworn testimony during the “Blago” trial, Emanuel served as Obama’s chief negotiator with the Blagojevich team as the former Illinois Governor attempted to illegally sell Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. Unfortunately, the federal prosecutor cut short the case against Blagojevich and Emanuel and other Obama insiders were never called to testify.

Emanuel left the White House under an ethical cloud and has decided to throw his hat in the ring for Mayor of Chicago, where he again stands accused of ignoring the rules and violating the law regarding candidate residency requirements.

Senator John Ensign (R-NV): In a scandal that first broke in 2009, Senator Ensign publicly admitted to an affair with the wife of a long-time staffer. And the evidence indicates Ensign then tried to cover up his sexual shenanigans by bribing the couple with lucrative gifts and political favors.

According to The New York Times, after Ensign’s aide, Douglas Hampton, discovered the affair, “Mr. Ensign asked political backers to find a job for…Hampton. Payments of $96,000 to the Hamptons also were made by Senator Ensign’s parents, who insist this was a gift, not hush money. Once a lobbying job was secured, Senator Ensign and his chief of staff continued to help Mr. Hampton, advocating his clients’ cases directly with federal agencies.”

These lobbying activities were seemingly in violation of the Senate’s “cooling off” period for lobbyists. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Under Senate rules, former Senate aides cannot lobby their former colleagues for one year after leaving Capitol Hill.” Hampton began to lobby Mr. Ensign’s office immediately upon leaving his congressional job.

Ensign seems to have ignored the law and allowed Hampton lobbying access to his office as a payment for his silence about the affair. And despite the claims of Ensign and his parents, the $96,000 in “gifts” provided to the Hamptons were clearly hush payments.

Nonetheless, on December 1, 2010, the Obama Justice Department announced it will file no criminal charges against Ensign, while the Federal Election Commission has also dismissed a related ethics complaint. If there is to be justice for Ensign, it will have to be up to the corrupt (see Boxer entry above) Senate Ethics Committee, which is still considering the charges against the Nevada Republican.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): In a story that continued to mushroom throughout 2010, Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) improperly intervened for Maxine Waters (D-CA) on behalf of his home-state OneUnited Bank to obtain Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds. When asked about the scandal, the Massachusetts Democrat admitted he spoke to a “federal regulator” but, according to The Wall Street Journal he didn’t remember which federal regulator he spoke with.” According to explosive Treasury Department emails uncovered by Judicial Watch in 2010, however, it appears this nameless bureaucrat was none other than then-Treasury Secretary Henry “Hank” Paulson.

While Frank’s “partner in crime” in the OneUnited scandal, Congressman Maxine Waters, is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee (see below), Frank’s colleagues in the House have inexcusably ignored the Massachusetts Democrat’s connection to the OneUnited grant.

To this day, Barney Frank continues to defend his role in the meltdown of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying he was just as blindsided as the rest of America when the two government sponsored enterprises collapsed, triggering the financial crisis. Frank has been peddling this fiction ever since the economy collapsed in September 2008. But, as The Boston Globe reported in a devastating article published on October 14, 2010, not many people are buying Frank’s lies anymore. And Frank knows it. Here’s an excerpt from the Globe:

"The issue…in 2003 was whether mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were fiscally strong. Frank declared with his trademark confidence that they were, accusing critics and regulators of exaggerating threats to Fannie’s and Freddie’s financial integrity. And, the Massachusetts Democrat maintained, ‘even if there were problems, the federal government doesn’t bail them out.’ Now, it’s clear he was wrong on both points…"

Frank wasn’t wrong. He was just lying through his teeth. Frank claims that he “missed” the warning signs with Fannie and Freddie because he was wearing “ideological blinders,” which was just his lame attempt to blame Republicans. But he did not miss them. According to evidence uncovered by Judicial Watch, he just chose to ignore them.

Judicial Watch obtained documents in 2010 proving that members of Congress, including — and perhaps especially — Barney Frank, were well aware that Fannie and Freddie were in deep trouble due to corruption and incompetence and yet they did nothing to stop it.

Moreover, as the Globe notes, in July 2008, then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson says he called Frank and told him the government would need to spend “billions of taxpayer dollars to backstop the institutions from catastrophic failure.” Frank, despite that conversation, appeared on national television two days later and said the companies were “fundamentally sound, not in danger of going under.” Less than two months later, the government seized Fannie and Freddie and the bailout began.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL): This year’s trial of scandal-ridden former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich ended with “Blago” being convicted of only 1 of 24 charges related to the scheme to sell Obama’s vacated Senate seat to the highest bidder. But as the government plans its second attempt to prosecute the case, one person who should be on the hot-seat is Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL).

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, “Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. directed a major political fund-raiser to offer former Gov. Rod Blagojevich millions of dollars in campaign cash in return for an appointment to the U.S. Senate.” How much cash? The Chicago Sun Times put that figure at $1.5 million in its initial reports.

But according to Jackson’s fundraiser, Raghuveer Nayak, the Illinois Congressman asked him to offer not $1.5 million, but a whopping $6 million in campaign cash to Blagojevich to secure the Senate seat!

In addition to his corrupt deal-making, in 2010 Jackson was also nailed for conducting an improper and potentially criminal relationship with a female “social acquaintance.”

Nayak told investigators that Jackson asked him to “pay to fly a Washington, DC, restaurant hostess named Giovana Huidobro…to Chicago to visit him.” Nayak reportedly did so twice.

We all know what “social acquaintance” means under these circumstances. Jackson says this is a “private and personal matter between me and my wife.” But not if it involves public funds or illegal gifts — issues which remain unsettled.

President Barack Obama: Remember the promise President Obama made just after his inauguration in 2009? “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

Instead, Americans have suffered through lies, stonewalling, cover-ups, corruption, secrecy, scandal and blatant disregard for the rule of law…this has been the Obama legacy in its first two years.

In 2010, Obama was caught in a lie over what he knew about Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s scheme to sell the president’s vacated Senate seat. Blagojevich’s former Chief of Staff John Harris testified that Obama had personal knowledge of Blago’s plot to obtain a presidential cabinet position in exchange for appointing a candidate handpicked by the President. In fact, according to Harris’s court testimony, Obama sent Blagojevich a list of “acceptable” Senate candidates to fill his old seat. Obama was interviewed by the FBI even before he was sworn into office. He claimed he and his staff had no contact with Blagojevich’s office. Unfortunately federal prosecutors never called the President or his staff to testify under oath.

The President also broke his famous pledge to televise healthcare negotiations. And in 2010, we learned why he broke his pledge. In what is now known as the “Cornhusker Kickback” scheme, Obama and the Democrats in the Senate “purchased” the vote of one of the last Democrat hold-outs, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, who opposed Obamacare over the issue of covering abortions with taxpayer funds. Nelson abandoned his opposition to Obamacare after receiving millions of dollars in federal aid for his home-state, helping to give the Democrats the 60 votes they needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. Same goes for Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, who received a $100 million payoff in what has been called “The Louisiana Purchase.” (The Kickback was so corrupt that Democrats stripped it out at the last minute. The Louisiana Purchase, on the other hand, became law of the land.)

Obama lied about his White House’s involvement in this legislative bribery that helped lead to the passage of the signature policy achievement of his presidency.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): “Air Pelosi” is now grounded.

Judicial Watch uncovered documents back in 2009 detailing attempts by Pentagon staff to accommodate Pelosi’s numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft for herself and her family as well as the speaker’s 11th hour cancellations and changes. In 2010, Judicial Watch kept the pressure on Pelosi, uncovering documents that demonstrated the Speaker was using U.S. Air Force aircraft as her own personal party planes. Overall, the Speaker’s military travel cost the United States Air Force $2,100,744.59 over a two-year period — $101,429.14 of which was for in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol.

For example, purchases for one Pelosi-led congressional delegation traveling from Washington, DC to Tel Aviv, Israel and Baghdad, Iraq May 15-20, 2008, included: Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey’s Irish Cream, Maker’s Mark whisky, Courvoisier cognac, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewar’s scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey, Corona beer and several bottles of wine.

Moreover, Pelosi also abused the rules by allowing members of her family to join her on taxpayer-funded Air Force flights. For example, on June 20, 2009, Speaker Pelosi’s daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons joined a flight from Andrews Air Force Base to San Francisco International Airport. That flight included $143 for on-flight expenses for food and other items. On July 2, 2010, Pelosi took her grandson on a flight from Andrews Air Force Base to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California, which is northeast of San Francisco.

Judicial Watch’s efforts not only exposed Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt abuse of military aircraft, but they also led to reform when Rep. John Boehner announced after Election Day that, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, he will fly commercial to and from Ohio instead of using military aircraft.

Of course, it was Rep. Nancy Pelosi who famously promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC during the campaign of 2006 when the Democrats seized control of power on Capitol Hill. That did not happen. Aside from her own personal transgressions, Pelosi also turned a blind eye to corruption on the part of her Congressional colleagues such as Charlie Rangel.

Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY): On December 2, 2010, the House of Representatives voted 333-79 to “censure” Rep. Charles Rangel. Next to expulsion, this is the most serious sanction that can be taken by the House against an individual member. This censure vote followed an investigation by the Committee for Official Standards of Conduct, which finally convicted Rangel on 13 ethics violations, including:

Forgetting to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income he earned from his off-shore rental property. (Rangel was formerly in charge of the committee responsible for writing tax policy.)
Misusing his congressional office, staff and resources to raise money for his private Rangel Center for Public Service, to be housed at the City College of New York. (He also put the squeeze on donors who had business before his House Ways and Means Committee, and used the congressional “free mail” privilege to solicit funds.)
Misusing his residentially-zoned Harlem apartment as a campaign headquarters.
Failing to report $600,000 in income on his official congressional financial disclosure reports, which contained “numerous errors and omissions.”
It is worth noting that the Committee did not consider other serious corruption charges against Rangel. For example, it has been alleged that Rangel preserved a tax loophole for an oil company in exchange for a Rangel Center donation. The Committee also did not consider the charge that Rangel used improper influence to maintain ownership of his highly coveted rent-controlled apartment — the same apartment he improperly used for campaign activities.

As this is Washington, politicians of both parties will pretend that censure is a serious punishment. But it is a “punishment” that simply requires Rangel to come to the well of the House and hear a disapproving statement read by lame-duck House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the real world, you get fired or thrown in jail for abusing your office and not paying your taxes.

Here is further context: The last time the House censured anyone was in 1983, when two congressmen (a Republican and Democrat) were censured for having sexual relationships with teenaged House pages. It seems that unless one is convicted of a crime, one can do anything as a congressman and not be thrown out of the House! The fact that the House has so rarely resorted to censure is more indicative of the lack of seriousness about ethics in Congress than of the so-called severity of the censure punishment.

Rangel should have been expelled from the House of Representatives.

Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY): On Election Day 2010, voters sent Congress a clear message: No more big spending or corrupt back-room deals! And what did House Republicans decide to do as one of their first moves for the new Tea Party Congress? Appoint Rep. Hal Rogers, also known as the “Prince of Pork,” to chair the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

According to ABC News: “In two years, Rogers pushed through 135 earmarks worth $246 million. He’s brought tens of millions of dollars into his hometown of Somerset, Ky., so much so that the town has been dubbed ‘Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood.’” Among the most egregious earmarks was a $17 million grant Rogers obtained for an “Airport to Nowhere,” a Kentucky airport with “so little traffic that the last commercial airline pulled out in February (2010).”

But the most serious charge against Rogers involves an earmark he obtained that could benefit one of his own family members.

Rogers secured $5 million in the House for conservation groups that work with wild cats, including the Cheetah Conservation Fund, a Namibia-based organization that employs Rogers’ daughter Allison. In fact, Allison Rogers serves as grants administrator. After she joined the organization in 2007, Congressman Rogers began his push for funding. In 2009, with help from Rogers, the bill passed the House by a 2-1 margin. (It has yet to be voted on in the Senate.)

Congressman Rogers claims he’ll change his stripes now: “No more earmarks. I’ll be the enforcer of the moratorium.” But Rogers’ 27 year history of wasting taxpayer funds on questionable projects is certainly cause for skepticism.

On November 9, 2010, Judicial Watch sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner asking him to reject a bid by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), who made our 2009 “Top Ten” list, to once again serve as Chair of the Appropriations Committee, given Lewis’s penchant for influence peddling. Rep. Rogers, however, is no upgrade.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA): Now that Charlie Rangel has been “punished” for his wrongdoing is California Rep. Maxine Waters next up on the hot-seat?

The Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (known informally as the House Ethics Committee) plans to hold hearings, although the committee delayed the trial indefinitely on November 29, 2010, citing newly discovered documentary evidence that may impact proceedings. According to The Associated Press, “The charges focus on whether Waters broke the rules in requesting federal help for a bank where her husband owned stock and had served on the board of directors.”

Judicial Watch has investigated the Waters/OneUnited Bank scandal for months. In fact, JW successfully sued the Obama Treasury Department to get documents and obtained explosive emails from the Treasury that provide documented evidence to support the charges against Waters.

For instance, a January 13, 2009, email from Brookly McLaughlin, Treasury’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, expresses surprise at Waters’ apparent conflict of interest:

Further to email below, WSJ [Wall Street Journal] tells me: …Apparently this bank is the only one that has gotten money through section 103-6 of the EESA law. And Maxine Waters’ husband is on the board of the bank.

Judicial Watch also uncovered documents detailing the deplorable financial condition of the bank at the time of the cash infusion, which showed that the bank would have been an unlikely candidate to receive TARP funding without intervention from Waters and Rep. Barney Frank.

Aside from OneUnited, there was yet another scandal with Waters’ fingerprints all over it.

According to The Washington Times: “A lobbyist known as one of California’s most successful power brokers while serving as a legislative leader in that state paid Rep. Maxine Waters’ husband $15,000 in consulting fees at a time she was co-sponsoring legislation that would help save the real-estate finance business of one of the lobbyist’s best-paying clients, records show.” That “real-estate finance business” was labeled a “scam” by the IRS in a 2006 report.

DISHONORABLE MENTION: Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) made Judicial Watch’s “Ten Most Wanted” list in 2008 for his corrupt relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for improperly accepting preferential treatment from Countrywide Financial as part of the company’s corrupt “Friends of Angelo” VIP program. Then he made the list again in 2009 for undervaluing a property he owns in Ireland on his Senate Financial Disclosure form. Dodd allegedly obtained a sweetheart real estate deal for the Ireland property in exchange for his assistance in obtaining a presidential pardon (during the Clinton administration) and other favors for a long-time friend and business associate. It seems the scandals were too much politically, and in 2010 Dodd announced he would not run for re-election. Despite his ethical lapses related to the financial sector, Dodd’s name (along with Barney Frank’s) is affixed to the “Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act,” the huge regulatory overhaul of the financial sector passed and signed into the law earlier this year. In January 2011 Dodd will be out of office.


www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/ten-most-corrupt-politicians-of-2010

[sandi66]

Report: six largest banks pay out billions in bonuses

by Vanessa Bostwick
December 17, 2010


A report released Wednesday by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) shows that the six largest banks on Wall Street are expected to shell out $143 billion in bonuses and compensation this year.

Bank of America tops the list, with $35 billion in bonuses and compensation set aside for its bankers.

The report criticizes the banks for the enormous payouts and says that the money could be better spent through investments to create $3.6 million jobs, thereby lowering the unemployment rate 2.3 percent.

In addition, the report argues that half of the $143 billion could be used to reset mortgage principal and interest rates on home loans that are in trouble.

TheHill.com writes that the Wall Street bonus money is enough to bridge the $130 billion budget gap for every state next year, as state and local governments are focused to cut vital services to make up for budget deficits.

The report also found that 37 percent of every dollar the six banks earn is allotted for bonuses and compensation.

Report Matt Browner-Hamlin writes on the SEIU blog, “Once again, Wall Street is on track to pay astronomical bonuses to its star traders, even as the rest of America is reeling from the devastation the banks have unleashed on the global economy. These billion-dollar bonuses come at our expense, have no rational justification, and only serve to destabilize the larger economy. It is time to rein in banker compensation to get the economy working for Main Street again and to prevent another global economic catastrophe in the near future.”



diversityjobs.com/news/report-six-largest-banks-pay-out-billions-in-bonuses/

[sandi66]

New Insider-Trading Arrests Point Toward Hedge Funds (Update1)
By Patricia Hurtado and Bob Van Voris


Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The arrests of three technology company workers who allegedly sold secrets about Apple Inc., Dell Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. signals the U.S. may be closing in on the hedge funds that paid for their expertise.

The men, who worked at AMD, Flextronics International Ltd. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., were arrested yesterday on securities fraud and conspiracy charges for a scheme that Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said operated from 2008 to early 2010.

Also arrested was James Fleishman, a sales manager at Primary Global Research LLC, the expert-networking firm where the three worked as consultants. If convicted, all four face as long as 20 years in prison.

“Prosecutors will want to pursue the hedge funds that hired the expert consultants to give them insider information,” said Stephen Miller, a lawyer at Cozen O’Connor LLP and a former federal prosecutor in New York and Philadelphia.

A fifth man, Daniel DeVore, 46, formerly a supply manager at Dell, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud in federal court in New York on Dec. 10, the U.S. said yesterday. DeVore said he worked as a paid consultant for Primary Global from late 2007 to August 2010 and, through the firm, accepted money from hedge funds for inside information.

Expert-networking companies such as Mountain View, California-based Primary Global match investors with specialists who provide insight into specific markets. The criminal complaint unsealed yesterday describes the links between Primary Global, the technology experts it employed and unidentified hedge funds willing to pay for inside information.

Search Warrants
On Nov. 22, FBI agents from New York and Boston executed search warrants at the offices of Level Global Investors LP and Diamondback Capital Management LLC, firms founded by alumni of SAC Capital Advisors. Agents that day also executed a search warrant at the offices of Loch Capital Management. None of the firms or their employees has been accused of any wrongdoing.

“A corrupt network of insiders at some of the world’s leading technology companies served as so-called consultants who sold out their employers by stealing and then peddling their valuable inside information,” Bharara said in a statement yesterday.

Investigators made consensual and wiretap recordings of an unidentified expert-networking firm’s phones, the land lines of an unidentified hedge fund and the mobile phones of two of the men arrested yesterday, Mark Anthony Longoria, who worked at chipmaker AMD, and Walter Shimoon of Flextronics, a Singapore- based maker of electronic components, the U.S. said. At least two hedge funds are described in the complaint. Neither is identified by name.

‘Find an Edge’
“Few hedge fund managers have the investment skill to deliver the benefits that they promise,” James Fanto, a professor at Brooklyn Law School in New York, said in an e-mail. “They have to find an edge however they can -- in this case through the expert networks,” said Fanto, who teaches banking, corporate and securities law.

The case is the latest by Bharara’s office alleging wrongdoing involving hedge funds based on wiretap evidence. He announced charges against Raj Rajaratnam, 53, the co-founder of Galleon Group LLC, in October 2009, calling it the largest insider-trading case involving hedge funds.

The new complaint shows the U.S. was recording conversations at Primary Global a month after Rajaratnam’s arrest.

“If you think you shouldn’t be talking about it --don’t,” an unidentified Primary Global employee tells Shimoon during one call, according to the complaint.

‘If You Recorded’
“That would really suck if you recorded all the calls,” Shimoon replies.

Fleishman, 41, of Santa Clara, California, was charged with wire fraud and conspiracy for allegedly trying to give non- public information to clients, including hedge funds, according to the complaint. Longoria, 44, of Round Rock, Texas; Shimoon, 39, of San Diego; and Manosha Karunatilaka, 37, of Marlborough, Massachusetts, who worked at chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor, were charged with wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Fleishman appeared in federal court in San Jose, California, yesterday and was released on $700,000 bail. Longoria was granted $50,000 bail and freed by a federal magistrate in Austin, Texas. Karunatilaka got bail of $300,000 in Boston federal court, his lawyer, Brad Bailey, said. Shimoon, of San Diego, didn’t make a court appearance yesterday.

‘Including Hedge Funds’
“PGR clients were money managers, including hedge funds, many of whom were located in Manhattan,” DeVore told U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff at his plea hearing, according to a court transcript.

“I provided to PGR clients and to PGR employees material non-public information, Dell confidential information, Dell’s production numbers, pricing inventory and market share of Dell’s hard drives suppliers,” he said. “I also knew that on several occasions I was speaking with hedge fund managers and employees located in New York,” he said.

David Frink, a spokesman for Round Rock-based Dell, the world’s third-biggest maker of personal computers, said the company will cooperate with law enforcement. DeVore’s lawyer, Johnny Sutton, declined to comment.

Longoria, Karunatilaka and Shimoon had worked as consultants at Primary Global, Dan Charnas, a company spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement. Fleishman has been placed on leave, Charnas said. He had no further comment.

Resigned From AMD
Longoria resigned from AMD in October, said Mike Silverman, a spokesman for the Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker.

“This kind of activity is expressly prohibited by the company,” Silverman said.

Longoria is cooperating with the investigation, Sam Bassett, his lawyer, said in an interview yesterday.

Flextronics supplied components to Apple during the time of the alleged fraud, prosecutors said in the statement. Shimoon is accused of providing Fleishman’s firm with confidential sales forecast information and new product features for the iPhone.

Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, declined to comment.

Renee Brotherton, a California-based spokeswoman for Flextronics, didn’t return an e-mail seeking comment. Taiwan Semiconductor said in an e-mail it terminated Karunatilaka’s employment on the day of his indictment and that the chipmaker will cooperate with U.S. prosecutors.

Fleishman is the second Primary Global employee charged by Bharara’s office. On Nov. 24, Don Ching Trang Chu was charged with arranging for insiders at publicly traded companies to improperly provide information to hedge fund clients.

Spherix Capital
Chu, 56, was accused of establishing a relationship with Richard Choo-Beng Lee, a former partner at San Jose, California- based hedge fund Spherix Capital LLC, prosecutors said in their complaint against Chu. Lee was employed as an analyst by SAC Capital Advisors LLC, the hedge fund firm run by Steven Cohen, from 1999 to 2004.

The U.S. said Spherix paid Chu’s firm for tips. Information was passed concerning Atheros Communications Inc., Broadcom Corp. and Sierra Wireless Inc., according to the government’s complaint. In yesterday’s filing, the U.S. said an unidentified cooperating witness, who worked as a co-manager at a hedge fund, directed payments to an unnamed expert-networking firm.

Lee pleaded guilty last year to insider trading at Spherix Capital and is cooperating with the U.S. in its probe of Galleon.

‘Cooperating Witness’
U.S. prosecutors identified Lee as “Cooperating Witness 1” in the latest complaint. In July 2009, Lee recorded conversations in which Longoria gave him inside information about AMD, the U.S. said. The new complaint also identifies Chu as having worked at Fleishman’s firm as a liaison “to consultants and other sources of information in Asia.”

In January, former McKinsey & Co. director Anil Kumar pleaded guilty to criminal charges, saying that he leaked advance information to Rajaratnam about AMD’s acquisition of ATI Technologies Inc. in 2006, which Rajaratnam used to make $19 million for Galleon.

Rajaratnam, 53, has denied wrongdoing and is scheduled for trial next year.

Bharara thanked Apple, Flextronics, AMD, Taiwan Semiconductor and Dell for their assistance in the U.S. probe. The investigation is continuing, he said.

“You have to imagine it will go in the direction of the funds,” said Miller, the former federal prosecutor.

The case is U.S. v. Shimoon, 10-mj-2823, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).


To contact the reporters on this story: Patricia Hurtado in New York federal court at [e-mail]; Bob Van Voris in New York federal court at [e-mail].
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David E. Rovella at [e-mail].

Last Updated: December 17, 2010 03:06 EST

noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aZAOVHVimh.s&pos=5


ty joye

[sandi66]

* Iraq’s Isolation Draws To an End With Less of a Bang Than a Whimper; Kuwait wanting payment advance?

December 17, 2010 05:39 am ·

Posted in NEWS · Comments Off
Iraq’s Isolation Draws To an End With Less of a Bang Than a Whimper; Kuwait wanting payment advance?
Posted: December 16, 2010 by Justhopin in Iraqi Dinar/Politics


UNITED NATIONS — Iraq’s return from the isolation into which it was cast by Saddam Hussein will be ended with less of a bang than a whimper here, as Vice President Biden chaired the proceedings but Kuwait held out out for a substantial payday.

The emirate of Kuwait blocked the American-led attempt to readmit Iraq, a budding democracy, into “the international fold” by ending restrictions imposed here during the last two decades as punishment for Saddam Hussein’s transgressions.

theiraqidinar.com/category/news/

[sandi66]

* UNSC Agenda Today (Friday Dec 17th)
December 17, 2010 05:35 am · Posted in NEWS · Comments Off
Friday, December 17, 2010

09:45 AM – 10:45 AM Security Council Media Stakeout
10:00 AM – 11:00 AM Security Council Meeting: Open debate on women and peace and security (continued)
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Press Conference: Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will hold his end-of-year press conference

Note: The Iraq-Kuwait Meeting scheduled for December 17th is a closed door session. The exact time of this meeting is TBA


theiraqidinar.com/category/news/

[sandi66]

The new government, tomorrow? .. Waiting for consensus

Posted: December 17, 2010

by Justhopin in Iraqi Dinar/Politics

Congress ruled that the witness of the parliamentary session scheduled for Saturday to Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki and some of the names of his cabinet ministers of the new non-arrival of the political blocs to a final consensus.

A member of the center coalition Iraqi Muhammad Iqbal said to offer “Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki is part of his government during the Saturday session is unlikely,” noting that “the government will be as one basket containing all the ministries”.

The news indicated that it was likely to submit to Prime Minister-designate some of his cabinet to the parliament tomorrow.

Iqbal said the “weekly” that “the issue of forming the government has not done so far and the difference between the political blocs are still present on the two first is the quality of ministries to be given to the political blocs and the second is the equation last to calculate the points it will be accounted for key positions in punctuation or not “.

Agree with Iqbal, a member of the National Alliance coalition of state law lipoidica Adnan, who said that “the constitutional period is not over yet there is no need to provide part of the government is also expected to politicians “.

Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki said in a speech at the General Conference of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Arbil atheist th December, he said that “the government will be before the end of the constitutional period granted to him “.

He said lipoidica for “weekly” to “The parliament session will address the controversial issues to facilitate the process of forming the government, notably lifting restrictions ablation of the leaders of the Iraqi List, they Saleh al-Mutlaq, Jamal al-Karbouli and Rasim al-Awadi “.

Meanwhile, leader of the Iraqi List Muhammad Al-Khalidi, “The candidates will hand over its list of ministries to the Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday “.

Khalidi said in a press statement that “the Iraqi List, will provide the names of candidates for the ministries to al-Maliki on Sunday to submit it to the political blocs, and then to parliament for a vote and authentication “.

As a coalition member Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish blocs, he saw that “the prime minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki will present his government to parliament next Thursday to give confidence “.

Osman explained in a press statement that “this government will be inclusive of some components and pushes aside the other,” noting that “there are portfolios will be a proxy for the lack of agreement on who will be carried out “.

The Iraqi political blocs have reached ten atheist in last November’s agreement to form a government of national partnership after a series of meetings on the initiative of President of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Massoud Barzani. And culminated in the agreement have spoken of the blocks to the House of Representatives on the same day which saw the election of a speaker and two deputies, in addition to the President of the Republic of Jalal Talabani, who has formally asked, in the twenty-fifth of last November, the candidate of the largest parliamentary bloc Nuri al-Maliki to form a new government. According to the constitution of Iraq, the Maliki, a period of thirty days to submit his cabinet to parliament for a vote of confidence, ending on the twenty-seventh of this month .

bit.ly/icBvwX

currencynewshound.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/the-new-government-tomorrow-waiting-for-consensus/

[sandi66]

* Iraq Gets a Government

December 17th, 2010 09:32 am · Posted in NEWS

When Saddam Hussein seized power in Iraq in 1979, he called a meeting of Baath Party leaders, arrested scores of them on charges of disloyalty, and promptly put 22 of them before firing squads. It was certainly an efficient way to choose a government.

For the past nine months a very different political spectacle has unfolded in Baghdad. A peacefully contested democratic election in March yielded an almost evenly split result, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law coalition gaining 89 parliamentary seats against challenger Ayad Allawi’s nonsectarian Iraqiya party’s 91. But Mr. Maliki proved a more dogged coalition builder and was able to bring Iraq’s Kurds into his governing coalition.

More controversially, he made his political peace with pro-Iranian cleric Moqtada Sadr, whose militia was defeated by U.S. and Iraqi troops in 2008 but whose party took 39 seats in the March poll. In a better world Mr. Sadr would be in jail rather than in politics. But what’s true of present-day Iraq could also be said of a few other democracies.

More significant is the patience Iraqis have demonstrated awaiting the formation of a government. Now it seems they finally have one, with a deal in which Mr. Allawi’s party will be given 11 of the cabinet’s 38 posts. Mr. Allawi will chair a new national security council, though its exact powers are still undefined. Crucially, an Iraqiya party member, Osama Nujaifi, will become speaker of parliament. Mr. Nujaifi is a Sunni.

As with everything in Iraq, the deal could fall apart. But a government that gives Mr. Allawi a serious security portfolio is not about to become a satrap of Tehran, not that this was ever a likely prospect in an Arab state even with Sadr in the government. A better question is whether the U.S. will be able to maintain its strategic influence in the country even as the remaining U.S. forces are set to depart in a year. If the Obama Administration is serious about building Iraq as a bulwark against Iran, it ought to signal its desire to extend the U.S. military presence. Most Iraqis would welcome it.

Edmund Burke said that all government “is founded on compromise and barter.” Iraq may still be far from being a model of Jeffersonian democracy. But contrary to what some of our friends might say, it understands Burke.

online.wsj.com/article/SB1000…googlenews_wsj


theiraqidinar.com/2010/12/17/iraq-gets-a-government/

[sandi66]

Obama to sign tax bill into law Friday afternoon

Posted: Dec 17, 2010 12:43 AM EST
Updated: Dec 17, 2010 10:53 AM EST

(Source: CNN)
WASHINGTON (RNN) -

President Barack Obama will sign the tax bill into law at 3:50 p.m. ET Friday afternoon.

The 277-148 House vote came during a late-night session Thursday, less than 24 hours after the Senate cleared the $801 billion package of tax cuts and $57 billion for extended unemployment insurance piece of legislation, 81-19.

The package includes a two-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts set to expire Dec. 31. It also extends unemployment benefits for 13 months, cuts the payroll tax by 2 percentage points for a year, restores the estate tax at a lower level and continues a series of other tax breaks.

"Not really sure I've heard anyone who likes the bill ... perhaps that's the hallmark of a successful negotiation. As I look at the legislation it's the classic challenge is the glass half or is it half empty. I for one have decided it to be half full," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX).

The passing of the bill was not devoid of opposition.

"It's just amazing to hear our colleagues, on the other side of the aisle talk about deficit reduction when everything on their side of the ledger increases the deficit and does not create jobs." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, said during her floor speech before the final votes.

Republican Rep. Dave Camp of Michigan, the next chairman of the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, argued that letting anyone's taxes go up would potentially block the country's efforts to continue jump starting economic recovery. Conversely a return to higher tax rates for those making more than $250,000 a year would hit small business owners who Camp said are important job creators.

Rep. Peter Defazio (D-OR) said he hopes the White House is listening when he said there is no such thing as a temporary tax cut. Defazio said signing this legislation is the administration springing the trap.

Earlier in the day, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said the bill was "good for growth, good for jobs, good for working and middle-class families, and good for businesses looking to invest and expand their work force."

Before the House vote, Obama praised the Senate vote in a statement calling it "a win for American families, American businesses, and our economic recovery." After admitting their parts of the bill he too opposed, he continued on to say, "As this bill moves to the House ... I hope that members from both parties can come together in a spirit of common purpose to protect American families and our economy as a whole by passing this essential economic package."

Several House Democrats pushed to change the estate tax to levels previously approved in a separate House bill that would exempt inheritances up to $3.5 million and tax amounts above that at a 45 percent rate.

House liberals weren't the only ones objecting to the agreement. Conservatives, including likely 2012 GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a column written for USA Today, challenged the deal because it doesn't permanently extend the Bush-era tax cuts and would add to the deficit.

www.live5news.com/Global/story.asp?S=13689515

[sandi66]

WikiLeaks Is Being 'Attacked' By Banks: Founder Assange

On Friday December 17, 2010, 1:08 pm EST

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told CNBC Friday that he's being "attacked" by banks in Dubai, Switzerland, the US and the UK.

Assange did not specify what he meant by "attacked."

WikiLeaks reiterated its plans to release information about banks in January, although Assange didn't specify which "leaks" the website would address. Friday's statement to CNBC marks the first time Assange has mentioned banks in Dubai.



Assange added that it is the "normal business" of WikiLeaks to publish information about banks. He also said that WikiLeaks has a cache of some 250,000 documents and that the site has released fewer than 2,000.

"We have been attacked, primarily, not by government, primarily, in fact, not by the US government, but by banks-banks from Dubai, banks from Switzerland, banks from the United States, banks from the UK, so, yes, of course, we are continuing to release material about banks," said Assange, who is out on bail from a Swedish court in relation to sexual assault charges.

In October of 2009, when Assange announced that WikiLeaks had copious documents about the Bank of America (NYSE:BAC - News), the stock took a hit.

finance.yahoo.com/news/WikiLeaks-Is-Being-Attacked-cnbc-3258974743.html;_ylt=AsUFW49rKmrKa.UU9AGM_qe7YWsA;_ylu=X3oDMTE1cGUwZDk5BHBvcwM4BHNlYwN0b3BTdG9yaWVzBHNsawN3aWtpbGVha3Npc2I-?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode= or


tinyurl.com/39zp448

[sandi66]

Iraqi Dinar Is Ripe for a Revaluation

Dec 18 2010

A growing wish list of individual investors outside of Iraq looking in is, will Iraq’s currency, the Iraqi dinar, significantly appreciate in value versus other currencies in the world in the near future?




As more and more new investors buy into this strong investment possibility, they tell their friends about it. And as their friends buy into it, those friends tell other friends about it, and so on. A point is reached where there are so many individual investors that have bought and are holding Iraqi dinars in their possession, waiting for the day on which the value of the Iraqi currency will soar.




When the new currency began to be printed in 2003, it was estimated that about 5 trillion dinars were printed for circulation. Overtime, so much of this money landed in the hands of investors around the world. New reports have suggested that about 25 trillion dinars have now been printed and are in circulation. And of course as time progresses, more and more dinars leave the country and are ending in more investor’s hands hoping to cash in big one day.




The Iraqi banking system has come a long way since 2003 to become more modern. Many of today’s internet financial transactions are taking place and the actual notes are not required. The Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) monitors this issue to a maintain a balance between the needs of paper cash in circulation for the citizens of Iraq to do daily business. One of the ways it controls a balance of cash on hand is to have daily auctions of foreign cash to trade back to their own currency.




During and after Saddam Hussein was in power, the main population of Iraqi citizens remained very poor. However, its citizens have experienced tough times before and can see their future in a growing Iraq as a reason to stay. The Iraqis have a strong sense of staying the course, because Iraq belongs to them. They have a strong core belief in their country as shown during the March 2010 elections. Many threats of violence was in the air that they could be risking their lives if they chose to go out and vote. But the Iraqi people showed up to vote.




When Saddam Hussein was still in power, many citizens were tortured and poisoned by the dictator, and he was unable to overcome them. When the war in Iraq began in 2003, Iraq was very frightening for it’s citizens. “But the war did not defeat them, and they weathered the storm. Even Iran terrorized the citizens of Iraq and tried to bribe their politicians. The Iraqi’s have survived all this. Iraq has become the bright shining star in the future in the Middle East at the forefront of a new democracy in that part of the world.




The most recent political elections March, 2010 is their second such elections since the new Iraqi government formed in 2005. It took lot of time for the election committees to complete their count. Every day in every major global news site, there’s a lot of news headlines on the progress of Iraq forming a new government. The whole world is watching and waiting for every word of every article. Why, because there are so many individual investors around the world that are invested in the new Iraqi dinar? (If you found this article, it’s probably because you were looking for it, for example.) Perhaps this is partly the reason. And maybe a lot of the reason why news like this coming out of Iraq is so important is because of all the potential for crude oil that they have.




Iraq has the third largest known oil reserves in the world. (Some believe that it is actually the second largest). There is more oil to find in Iraq than anyone can imagine. Every week there is a new story in the news about a another oil field discovery in Iraq. And also, it seems like every week there is a news story about another country or major oil company signing a contract with Iraq for the rights to a piece of the oil reserves. Iraq gets revenues from every gallon of petroleum that comes out of the ground. This revenue is really starting to escalate. And the world needs crude to sustain life as we know it and it’s beginning to make Iraq a very rich country.




Many Optimistic Signs!

In September 2005, the new Iraqi government signed their new constitution into Law. Since then, the presence of Iraq’s military, with the help of large foreign military alliances, made the country more secure, with only a small amount of terrorism still lurking in the shadows. There is finally a perception that security is now under control, and in late 2010, the foreign military alliances will begin to withdraw from Iraq as they will be able to manage it with less help.




The Iraqi economy has started to spread its wings and their stock exchange has gotten off the ground. Many of the necessary utilities such as electricity and water have also improved over time.




If you began investing in the Iraqi Dinar from 2003 to 2006, you would have realized at that time that the currency was a investment long shot, but it just had enough potential to peak your interest. And if you have remained in this investment or are just getting in it now, the chances of this investment paying off has greatly improved compared to before.




Here is a quote from a newspaper ad I saw in 2006.




“Stability is the keyword in Iraq. Democracy is taking over and the Iraqi people are free. It is only a matter of time before the Dinar is released on the foreign exchange and many experts feel that Baghdad could be a mirror image of Kuwait City but on a much larger scale.”




The United States government believes Iraq is worth it, because it uses its tax dollars to help the Iraqi economy to get going. An oil company executive who requested anonymity, who bought dinars saying, “If you think the U.S. will let the second largest oil producing country in the world fall into the hands of bandits again guess again. That is not going to happen”.




Recently, the Iraqi government said, “we have promised the people of Baghdad and Iraq that the next four years will be the phase of construction and greater economy, and we will fulfill our promise”.




So, to answer the original question above, is the Iraqi dinar ripe for a revaluation?




Vehemently, YES! Because a new government is in place, and old oil fields are getting back on line, and new ones are being discovered, and security has been restored. Iraq also had a lot of debt piled up unpaid to many other countries. And most of that debt has now been forgiven by those countries. What will keep the Iraqi dinar revaluation from happening now? It is no longer a question of “If”, but “When” will it happen!

iraqdailytimes.com/iraqi-dinar-is-ripe-for-a-revaluation/

[sandi66]

* Dinar Daddy: A Slow Saturday… with AMAZING Results!
December 18th, 2010 09:43 pm · Posted in CHATS / POSTS, TIDBITS
All,

Just droppping a note to lift your spirits… Here’s what I’m seeing…

1) Iraq seems to be moving up their timeline from Thursday (23rd) to as early as Monday (20th) to officially announce the government.

2) Maliki will be officially announcing his Cabinet on Monday (20th), where before he had stated it would be done on Tuesday (21st).

3) Iraq is ALREADY preparing to contest the “remaining items” that hold them within their sanctions (Chapter 7). This confirms they feel they are all but done with Kuwait issues.

4) Allawi met with Maliki for the 2nd time in a week. I don’t know about you, but to me that means the are ALREADY working together. Obama and Biden don’t even meet that much in a week.

5) The “first reading” of the budget was completed today. It appears the MPs are actually going to work and are striving to complete that task to officially approve the budget. Nice!

6) The CBI is obviously ensuring Kurdistan is included in their valuations, or they wouldn’t, “call for monetary integration with the Kurdistan region”.

7) The hotly contested issue of certain Sunni politicians who’ve been banned, yet still were creating issues within Parliament, has been resolved. Now that they are included, it appears EVERYONE is working together, and the government formation is looking more of a certaintly every day.

All of the above are simple “snippets” of information I’ve gained from the NEWS today. They should bring you peace about what we’re witnessing. Things are moving quickly, and for that knowledge, I feel this Saturday has been a GREAT and EVENTFUL day.

I will add more tomorrow in my SMS “Weekly Update“ text message & blog roll post.

Go Dinar!

Dinar Daddy

theiraqidinar.com/2010/12/18/dinar-daddy-a-slow-saturday-with-amazing-results/

[sandi66]

16 December 2010

The Butterfly Effect: Outsourcing, the USA PATRIOT Act and OFAC

By Alistair Maughan, Oliver I. Ireland and Panagiotis C. Bayz

As a demonstration of the butterfly effect of chaos theory, changes made to U.S. law after the 9/11 terror attacks are now being raised as blockages on the competitiveness of U.S.-based outsourcing and IT services companies when competing for business in Europe and Asia.

The USA PATRIOT Act contains provisions allowing the U.S. government access to business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations. The extraterritorial effect of the USA PATRIOT Act means that confidential data of non-U.S. outsourcing customers is potentially open to disclosure to the U.S. authorities via any U.S.-based service provider (or its non-U.S.-based affiliate) handling that data.

This Client Alert examines the effect of the USA PATRIOT Act – and the extraterritorial effect of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control rules – on non-U.S. entities that enter into outsourcing or IT services arrangements with U.S. corporations or their overseas subsidiaries. In particular, it addresses whether a non-U.S. subsidiary or affiliate of a U.S. corporation may be required under the USA PATRIOT Act to disclose to the FBI data belonging to its customers, and what actions non-U.S.-based customers can take to retain control of their data.

THE USA PATRIOT ACT Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, enacted in the months following the 9/11 terror attacks, provides the U.S. government with the means to access to business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.

Specifically, section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act permits the FBI to apply for an order “requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence information not concerning a United States person or to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.” If a U.S. judge finds that an FBI application meets the relevant requirements, the judge must enter an ex parte order approving the release of items sought.

The USA PATRIOT Act is extraterritorial in application: it permits the U.S. authorities to enforce its provisions against non-U.S. entities and non-U.S. data. The extraterritoriality applies via corporate ownership and the location of servers or data. It would not be a defense for a U.S. company which possesses or processes data to say that it does so outside the U.S. It would be harder, but by no means impossible, for the U.S. authorities to enforce disclosure provisions on a non-U.S. entity with operations overseas. The position of a non-U.S. affiliate of a U.S. parent which processes data outside the U.S. is less clear: much would depend on the degree of connection to the U.S.

If the recipient of a section 215 order is, for example, an EU-based entity and the entity chooses to disregard the court order, a judge may attempt to enforce such order against the U.S. parent of the EU-based entity. In addition, the U.S. parent itself may be direct recipient of the section 215 order. These circumstances present a different scenario because the U.S. parent corporation would be within the jurisdiction of the judge that issued the section 215 order. The U.S. parent corporation would need to decide whether to challenge or comply with the order. As a result, whether or not the order would cause the production of the EU-derived information would likely depend on the U.S. parent corporation’s control over the EU-based entity and the U.S. company’s willingness to challenge the U.S. government in order to protect its customer.

Under both scenarios, the U.S. parent corporation may request that the EU-based entity disclose the EU-derived information to the FBI. But, if the U.S. parent corporation did not have sufficient control over the EU-based entity, the U.S. parent corporation could not require the EU-based entity to produce the information. In other words, unless the EU-based entity was controlled by its U.S. parent corporation, the EU-based entity would have the option to refuse to produce EU-derived information to the FBI.

In this context, the USA PATRIOT Act does not set out a clear definition of control that would govern whether the U.S. parent corporation controlled the EU-based entity and could require it to produce information. This determination is likely to be highly fact-dependent. Further, to the extent that a U.S. parent corporation sought to isolate a company from its control for purposes of performing a contract with that EU-based customer, the U.S. corporation would lose the ability to control the quality of the services provided. Nonetheless, it should be possible for a U.S. parent corporation to retain a significant economic interest in an EU-based entity, such as through the ownership of non-voting preferred stock, without having the actual ability to control the actions of the EU-based entity.

EFFECT ON OUTSOURCING AND IT SERVICES In some situations, section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act can have a significant potential effect on outsourcing and IT services contracts.
For example, assume that a European bank wishes to outsource services which involve access to, or processing of, its European customers’ data. The bank chooses as its service provider a well-known and highly reputable global but U.S.- headquartered service provider. The bank will no doubt include in its contract robust privacy and data security arrangements, including provisions that comply with EU data privacy laws which prohibit transfers of data outside the European Economic Area. The bank may think that there is no chance of its data being disclosed to the U.S. government (or, indeed, anyone else) without its consent. It would be wrong.

•
If the bank has contracted directly with a U.S.-based company, the service provider is clearly subject to the jurisdiction of U.S. authorities. When faced with a choice between its contract with its customer and the combined might of the FBI and the U.S. government, there must clearly be a possibility that the service provider would disclose any information demanded by U.S. authorities.

•
Anti-tip-off provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act prevent the service provider from informing its customer of the order for disclosure.

•
The customer may include contractual provisions requiring the service provider to resist or challenge any subpoena under the USA PATRIOT Act – but how far must the service provider go to comply with such provisions?

•
Even if the bank has been careful to enter into a contract with a non-U.S.-based subsidiary or affiliate of the U.S. parent and to ensure that the service provider doesn’t use any U.S.-based resources to undertake services under the contract, it is not necessarily exempt. The USA PATRIOT Act has extraterritorial effect, and the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice can seek enforcement against non-U.S. subsidiaries of U.S. corporations.

The U.S. authorities may only seek disclosure or data if the items sought can be obtained with a subpoena duces tecum issued by a court of the United States in a grand jury investigation or with any other order issued by a U.S. court directing the production of records or tangible things.

The U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”), which generally represents the U.S. in legal matters, has issued guidance relating to the government’s abilities and limitations with respect to subpoena duces tecum. Specifically, the Antitrust Division Grand Jury Practice Manual (“DOJ Manual”) provides guidance, based on relevant U.S. case law and the DOJ’s broad practical experience, for all DOJ personnel with respect to the performance of their grand jury-related responsibilities. The DOJ Manual clarifies, for example, that a subpoena duces tecum:

a. may be served on any legal entity or corporation, including foreign affiliates of U.S. companies;

b. may not be served on a foreign government;

c. may seek any type of non-privileged document or physical evidence; and

d. must be reasonable in scope.

Section 215 provides no scope or guidance relating to the jurisdiction of a U.S. judge to issue an order to foreign entities. Because section 215 provides no limitations on the types of persons to whom a judge in the U.S. may issue an order, a judge would have the authority to issue such an order to a non-U.S. entity that is a subsidiary or affiliate of a U.S. corporation or to the U.S. corporation itself. A judge may choose not to issue such an order on grounds of comity, although we are not aware of any instances where a judge has refused to do so – but it is possible that this could happen especially if the information at issue belonged, say, to a foreign government entity as opposed to a bank or company.

The DOJ Manual also recognizes that subpoena recipients may be prevented from complying with the requirement to produce documents by virtue of local country “blocking statutes” which render the provision of the material unlawful under local law where the information or its holder is based. Unfortunately, the DOJ Manual does not specify what form a blocking statute might take nor set out a definitive list of existing statutes. It does, however, mention Germany, Australia, France and the U.K. as examples of countries that potentially possess a blocking statute.
Therefore, a non-U.S.-based outsourcing customer may take some comfort in the fact that even the DOJ recognizes that local laws may limit the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the USA PATRIOT Act. The problem remains, however, that much will depend on the attitude of the U.S. service provider or its overseas affiliate that gets served with the order to produce documents or data.

For a start, the USA PATRIOT Act contains anti-tip-off provisions, so the service provider would be in breach of U.S. law if it were to tell the customer about the subpoena, its scope or its proposed response.

Also, the customer can’t be sure which way the services provider will proceed when faced with legal action by the U.S. authorities. Will it stand behind its customer, cite the contract provisions on confidentiality and data privacy, and enforce the local “blocking statute”? Will it take steps to challenge the subpoena through the U.S. courts, and how far must it go (and how much must it spend) to do so? Or will it decide that, at the end of the day, its loyalties and long-term commercial interests lie in cooperating with the U.S. authorities?

PRACTICAL GUIDANCE Non-U.S.-based outsourcing customers can take steps to minimize the likelihood of their data being subject to orders of production under the USA PATRIOT Act.
First, if confidentiality of data is a major concern it is clearly better to contract with a non-U.S. subsidiary than with the U.S. parent – although there may, of course, be a number of offsetting reasons (including maintaining financial stability) why one might prefer a direct parent company contract.

Second, if you do contract with a non-U.S. subsidiary, you should check the organizational structure of a service provider to ensure that data is only held by non-U.S. companies that are clearly not subject to significant levels of U.S. management, share ownership and control. You should probably back this up with contractual requirements which prevent changes to organizational structure without customer consent.

Third, contracts should go as far as is permissible to require service providers to notify and consult with the customer prior to any legal request for enforced disclosure of documents or data. Contracts should also deal with the issue of the service provider’s obligations to challenge any order or subpoena through the U.S. courts.

Finally, contracts should expressly tee up the blocking statute defense, i.e., state that disclosure under the USA PATRIOT Act is expressly prohibited and a violation of the local data protection or privacy statute. Customers may go further and elevate disclosure to foreign government authorities to the status of a terminable event, or at the very least, require service providers to indemnify their customers from any third party claims that are asserted (e.g., from affected individuals) as a result of the disclosure.

AND ANOTHER THING … THE OFAC RULES In fact, the provisions of section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act are comparable to another set of U.S. laws that have a similar effect.

Under the trade sanctions and economic embargoes administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”), a part of the U.S. Treasury Department, U.S. persons may not engage in trade, financial transactions and other dealings with certain designated countries or with a person or entity identified on the list of Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (“SDN”). In order to comply with the OFAC rules, U.S. companies screen transaction counterparties against the SDN list. If there is a match with the SDN list, the U.S. company is obliged to cease doing business with that person. Financial institutions are obliged to give notice to OFAC of a positive match. However, when even non-financial sector companies believe that they may have engaged in a transaction with a person on the OFAC SDN list, they often elect to disclose such violation voluntarily to mitigate potential penalties.

The effect of the OFAC rules on outsourcing by non-U.S. companies differs according to circumstances and the approach taken by service providers. There have been cases where U.S.-based service providers to high-profile European outsourcing customers have taken “doing business” literally and have cross-checked the SDN list in relation to all customer data processed.

Take the example of a U.S. company that wins the contract to process citizens’ data held by a large European government agency. The view here could be that the OFAC regulations require the U.S.-based company to verify that it is not doing business directly or indirectly with individuals on the SDN list, and so it is at significant risk of civil or criminal penalties if, in the course of performing services, it processes data relating to an OFAC prohibited person; and the only way of managing this risk is for the U.S.-based company to check each name against the SDN list.

The customer in this example would clearly consider that the matching of names against the SDN list is in breach of the services agreement, and that use of data is not authorized under local law, thus creating potential liability for the customer (as “data controller”) to citizens whose data are so processed as well as potentially violating local data protection law.

The customer would equally object that the OFAC cross-checking requirement does not apply here because the U.S. company is not providing any services direct to citizens (i.e., the contract is with the government agency). However, the scope of the OFAC regulations also prohibits U.S. persons from “facilitating” (which is defined broadly in the regulations) transactions with an SDN. If the customer’s client is an SDN, OFAC would take the view that the U.S. person is facilitating a transaction with an SDN, and thus engaged in an OFAC-prohibited transaction.

CONCLUSION Outsourcing contracts between non-U.S. customers and U.S. service providers (or subsidiaries of U.S. service providers) should be adapted to address the issues that arise under the USA PATRIOT Act and the OFAC rules. Customers should take into account any additional risks to the security and confidentiality of their data when selecting a service provider, and may need to take structural or contractual steps to maintain data security for their, and their customers’, protection.

Contact:
Alistair Maughan [phone] [e-mail]
Oliver I. Ireland [phone] [e-mail]
Panagiotis C. Bayz [phone] [e-mail]

About Morrison & Foerster:
We are Morrison & Foerster—a global firm of exceptional credentials in many areas. Our clients include some of the largest financial institutions, investment banks, Fortune 100, technology and life science companies. We’ve been included on The American Lawyer’s A-List for seven straight years, and Fortune named us one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Our lawyers are committed to achieving innovative and business-minded results for our clients, while preserving the differences that make us stronger. This is MoFo. Visit us at www.mofo.com.

Because of the generality of this update, the information provided herein may not be applicable in all situations and should not be acted upon without specific legal advice based on particular situations.

www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=c3d0ce48-ec6a-4541-9076-fc288a9cf9c4

[sandi66]

Chalabi: Iraq to pay more than $ 30 billion in reparations to Kuwait and should form a committee to negotiate to raise the deductions









ÇáäÎíá-ØÇáÈ ÚÖæ ÇáÊÍÇáÝ ÇáæØäí ÇáäÇÆÈ ÇÍãÏ ÇáÌáÈí Çáíæã ÇáÓÈÊ ÈÊÔßíá áÌäÉ ááÊÝÇæÖ ãÚ ÇáßæíÊ ÈÔÃä ÑÝÚ ÇáÇÓÊÞØÇÚÇÊ ÇáãÝÑæÖÉ Úáì ÇáÚÑÇÞ æÇáÈÇáÛÉ 5% ãä ÕÇÏÑÇÊå ÇáäÝØíÉ. Palms - A member of the National Alliance MP Ahmad Chalabi on Saturday formed a committee to negotiate with Kuwait on the lifting of deductions imposed on Iraq, amounting to 5% of its oil exports.

ÇáÌáÈí ßÔÝ Ýí ãÏÇÎáÊå ÈÌáÓÉ ãÌáÓ ÇáäæÇÈ ÇßÏ Çä ÇáÚÑÇÞ ÏÝÚ ÇßËÑ ãä 30 ãáíÇÑ ÏæáÇÑ ááßæíÊ ßÊÚæíÖÇÊ ãÇáíÉ ¡ãÔíÑÇ Çáì ÚÏã æÌæÏ ÓÞÝ Òãäí áÇäåÇÁ åÐå ÇáÚÞæÈÇÊ. Chalabi revealed in his speech meeting of the Council of Representatives confirmed that Iraq has to pay more than $ 30 billion in compensation to Kuwait Finance, pointing to the absence of a time limit for ending the sanctions.

æÊÇÚ ÇáÌáÈí íäÈÛí ÇáÈÍË Úä ØÑíÞÉ Íá áåÐå ÇáÇãæÇá ÇáÊí ÊÐåÈ Çáì ÇáßæíÊ æÇä ÇáÍßæãÉ ÇáÚÑÇÞíÉ æÇáÔÚÈ ÇáÚÑÇÞí áíÓ áåÇ áÇ äÇÞÉ æáÇ Ìãá æßá ÇáÇÝÚÇá ßÇäÊ ãä ÌÑÇÆã ÇáäÙÇã ÇáÈÇÆÏ. And Taa Chalabi should look for a way to solve this money that goes to Kuwait and the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people do not have do not do nothing and all the acts were crimes of the former regime.

translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ar&u=http://www.nakhelnews.com/pages/news.php%3Fnid%3D4297&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dnahrain%26hl%3Den%26prmd%3Div&rurl=translate.google.com



ty David

[sandi66]

Iraq's Allawi says will join Maliki government

Sun Dec 19, 2010 9:30am EST

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Former prime minister Iyad Allawi, whose cross-sectarian coalition won the most seats in Iraq's March election, said Sunday he will join Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's government.

Allawi's decision, after weeks of wavering, cleared another potential hurdle in long and contentious negotiations between Iraq's Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish political blocs to form a new government after an inconclusive election.

Maliki is to unveil his cabinet in parliament Monday.

The participation of Allawi and Iraqiya could help ease concern about renewed bloodshed as Iraq emerges from years of war and U.S. troops withdraw completely by the end of 2011.

Allawi, a secular Shi'ite, had wanted to unseat Shi'ite premier Maliki after his Iraqiya bloc won 91 seats in the new parliament with strong backing from Iraq's minority Sunnis. He had warned that any attempt to marginalize his coalition could reinvigorate a weakened but still lethal insurgency.

Washington and Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors were anxious to ensure that Allawi's bloc was represented in the government.

Allawi said he would accept a job as head of a national strategic policy council that was offered in a power-sharing deal involving Maliki and Kurdish president Masoud Barzani on November 10.

"We will accept the leadership of this council based on the agreements that have occurred and have been signed between me and Mr Barzani and Mr Maliki," Allawi told a news conference. "So this is concluded. If there is any change to the agreements on power, then there will be a different story all together."

Allawi had been indecisive about joining the government after the November 10 accord between the political factions that put Maliki on course for a second term as premier. The accord also returned Kurd Jalal Talabani to the presidency and gave Sunni Osama al-Nujaifi the speaker's post in parliament.

ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE6BI12P20101219

[sandi66]

Goldman Sachs & Merrill Lynch Implicated In Short Sale Scheme

Brandon Matthews

Dec. 19, 2010, 11:21 AM


Goldman Sachs & Merrill Lynch Implicated In Short Sale Scheme
Brandon Matthews, SatwavesPro.com | Dec. 19, 2010, 11:21 AM | 623 | 2
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x Email ArticleFrom To Email Sent!You have successfully emailed the post. inShare.1 Brandon Matthews

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Subscribe to his Twitter feed Brandon Matthews is the founder of SatwavesPro.com and a top 20 Seeking Alpha Contributor.
.
An Apple A Day, Keeps Sirius XM Short-Sellers Away
Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch Named By Overstock: May Face RICO Charges
Sirius XM Is Still Its Own Worst Enemy


There is a simple truth when it comes to Sirius XM Radio. Had it not been the victim of an illegal naked short selling scheme three years ago, it’s stock today would be worth significantly more than it currently is. The scheme cost investors tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars. Many investors lost everything, and developed an ill will towards the company as a result. Sirius XM continues to heal from the wounds that were inflicted. Thanks to Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com, we now have suggested evidence of an actual conspiracy that took place, by the biggest and most trusted names on Wall Street.

While the Securities & Exchange Commission is attempting to bolster investor confidence through the prosecution of some small time insider sales, it ignores the trust that was stolen by manipulation schemes such as the one uncovered by Overstock. While the S.E.C. boasts of the arrests of insignificant investors, Wall Street firms are given little more than a stern scolding. There is no doubt in my mind, that the S.E.C. turned a blind eye to this blatant theft from retail shareholders. Whom might I ask, can protect investors from the people charged with protecting investors?

What you are about to see will disgust you. It will disgust you whether you were an investor in Sirius XM Radio, Dendreon, Overstock.com, TASER, CMKM Diamonds, or any other company that fell victim to an intentional scheme to defraud investors, and rob the retirement, college or other savings of hard working people.





Overstock.com is suing Morgan Stanley regarding the naked short selling of its securities. In the course of finding fact, Overstock.com has uncovered what it claims to be damaging evidence of a conspiracy to defraud investors. In court papers obtained by SatwavesPro.com, Overstock is asking the court to add a claim for violations of the RICO act against Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch.




The filing itself is heavily redacted, yet it is clearly suggestive that a lawsuit by TASER has uncovered similar overlapping characteristics to Overstock’s own findings, along with a third redacted company.





The accusations, are stunning. I was witness to the effects of naked short selling of Sirius XM Radio shares. While Goldman Sachs had a negative outlook and rating on Sirius, Merrill Lynch had a completely optimistic view. To learn the two companies were potentially working together is an outrage.


www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-and-merrill-lynch-implicated-in-short-sale-scheme-2010-12


To read the legal stuff mentioned in this post, you must go to the link itself.

www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-and-merrill-lynch-implicated-in-short-sale-scheme-2010-12

or

tinyurl.com/2cd6tx9

[sandi66]

Iraq govt formation hits new snag
By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA - Dec 20, 2010 5:01 AM ET

By The Associated Press

BAGHDAD (AP) — The long awaited announcement of Iraq's new government set for Monday will be delayed once again over disputes between the parties on how the posts will be distributed, officials said.

The disagreements are the latest snag following months of delays in putting together a government after inconclusive parliamentary elections in March left Iraq's politics deadlocked.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's advisers Ali al-Dabbagh and Ali al-Moussawi insisted that at least a portion of the new Cabinet will be presented to parliament Monday as originally promised, with more than half the names put to a vote.

Parliament spokesman Omar al-Mashhadani, however, flatly denied that the new Cabinet will be announced.

Al-Maliki has until Saturday to present his Cabinet under a 30-day deadline imposed by Iraq's constitution. If he does not, President Jalal Talabani will assign another member of parliament to do it.

The constitution does not specify how Talabani would select the next lawmaker to create the government, but it could mean that al-Maliki will lose his shot to remain prime minister after more than nine months of postelection haggling to build enough support from former opponents to remain in power.

Monday's holdup was caused by foot-dragging by the secular but Sunni-backed Iraqiya political alliance that opposed al-Maliki in the March 7 vote.

Iraqiya lawmaker Jabar al-Jabari said the alliance has not yet submitted its candidates for cabinet posts because the group's members are still undecided who should get what.

"We have not yet handed al-Maliki the names because we are trying to come up with the best candidates for the job," he said.

Iraqiya only recently dropped its long-standing demand to form the government, instead of al-Maliki, since the alliance narrowly won the most seats in the election.

Iraqiya leader Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, said his concession to al-Maliki came only after he was assured about a power-sharing agreement to fairly divide up the posts among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.



www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-20/iraq-govt-formation-hits-new-snag.html

[sandi66]

UPDATE 1-Infighting delays new Iraq government
Mon Dec 20, 2010 10:12am GMT


* Infighting delays formal announcement of new cabinet
* Prime minister may announce partial list

(Adds delay, details, quotes)

By Suadad al-Salhy

BAGHDAD, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Political infighting and last-minute horse-trading delayed the formal announcement of a new Iraqi government on Monday, lawmakers said, as Iraq sought to end a 9-month vacuum created by an inconclusive election.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had been expected to introduce his cabinet choices before parliament on Monday, but lawmakers and a spokesman for the speaker said the day's agenda did not include the announcement. A spokesman for Maliki said he would proceed anyway, announcing a partial list.

The final deadline to approve the cabinet is at the end of the week, and the eleventh-hour squabbling and power-plays highlight the ethnic and sectarian divisions that pervade the country, 7-1/2 years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein.

"Maliki delayed the announcement to give all blocs an opportunity to review their nominations and to put the final touches on an agreement and achieve greater consensus," said Abdel-Hadi al-Hassan, a politician from Maliki's Dawa Party.

Maliki's cabinet is expected to retain Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani, the Shi'ite architect of ambitious plans to turn Iraq into a top global oil producer, as well as Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari, a Kurd.

Shahristani is seen as a vital member of the new cabinet and his reappointment is important to assure investors Iraq will honour deals to develop its vast reserves.

Ahmed al-Oraibi, a lawmaker for the Sunni-backed Iraqiya political coalition, said political leaders were expected to sort out lingering disputes over the division of posts later on Monday, but other officials said resolving the problem could take longer.


DELAY REFLECTS WRANGLING

Maliki's spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the premier would announce "half the new government" later in the day.

Ibrahim al-Sumaidaie, an Iraqi political analyst, said the wrangling was an attempt by political parties to wrest concessions on ministerial appointments from Maliki.

"There are blocs that want to squeeze Maliki to make him respond to their demands," he said. "But Maliki can turn the tables on them and can go to parliament with half of the cabinet -- taking into consideration that he can insure a majority in the assembly."

A power-sharing deal last month between Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs put Maliki on track for a second term as prime minister. The Nov. 10 agreement returned Kurd Jalal Talabani to the presidency and made Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni, parliament's speaker.

Former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite whose cross-sectarian coalition won the most seats in the March 7 vote, was unable to garner enough support to secure the premiership but has said he will also join the government as head of a new national strategic policy council.

Allawi's decision, which he announced on Sunday after weeks of uncertainty, could soothe worries about renewed sectarian violence.

Maliki is not expected to reveal sensitive security posts, including the interior, defence and national security ministers, as nominees have not yet been decided.

Iraq is seeking to rebuild damaged and neglected infrastructure after decades of war and sanctions. It relies on oil for 95 percent of federal revenues and has set out ambitious targets to boost output capacity to 12 million barrels per day (bpd) over the next six or seven years from 2.5 million today.

af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE6BJ0I020101220

[sandi66]

December 20, 2010

Indigenous Rights Endorsed

The United States announced their endorsement of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples three years into its adoption. With the U.S. having been the last of four hesistant members to support the Declaration, it is now fully endorsed by the UN.

Below is an article published by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues:

The United States has announced that it endorses the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Earlier today [16 December 2010] President Barack Obama announced that the United States support the Declaration in an address to the White House Tribal Nations Conference. Back in April the U.S. had said that it would be revising its position. This announcement comes just over a month after Canada made a similar move announcing its support for the Declaration, while New Zealand announced its support in April this year. Australia endorsed the Declaration in 2009.

When the Declaration was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2007, four countries voted against. They were Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

www.unpo.org/article/12071

[sandi66]

UPDATE 1-Maliki picks Shahristani for deputy PM-officials

Mon Dec 20, 2010 1:28pm GMT

* Maliki's current plan elevates Shahristani to deputy PM

* Luaibi moves up to oil min under current plan-officials

(Adds background, details, quotes)

By Muhanad Mohammed and Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's latest cabinet list, not yet presented to parliament, has current Oil Minister Hussain al-Shahristani taking a new job as deputy prime minister for energy, senior officials said on Monday.

Current deputy oil minister Abdul Kareem Luaibi would become oil minister under Maliki's latest plan, said Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a senior Shi'ite politician and ex-prime minister.

"In the cabinet formation list that is supposed to be submitted today by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Hussain al-Shahristani is nominated as deputy prime minister for energy and Abdul Kareem Luaibi is the oil minister," Jaafari said.

Two other senior sources in Maliki's political coalition confirmed that Shahristani, a nuclear scientist by trade, had decided to take the deputy prime minister post.

"Hussain al-Shahristani asked for broader authority in the oil industry, especially with the issues of the contracts in the country's bidding rounds, and to have a say in running Iraq's energy sector," one senior official said.

"When he got these assurances he accepted the post of deputy prime minister for energy."

Shahristani, who is also Iraq's acting electricity minister, is the architect of ambitious plans to vault the country into the top ranks of global oil producers.

He guided the oil ministry as it reached a series of deals with oil majors that could boost Iraq's output capacity to 12 million barrels per day, rivalling global leader Saudi Arabia, from about 2.5 million barrels per day now.

af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFLDE6BJ19S20101220

[sandi66]

Citi Analyst In Tragic Death Leap

last updated: 20 December 2010

Just one week after the shock suicide of Bernie Madoff's son Mark, the financial markets have been rocked by the tragic death of 27-year-old Citi analyst Jessica Fashano, who died early Saturday morning.
Ms Fashano, who had worked at Citi Global Markets in New York for five years and had even featured in a recruitment video, is said to have asked a passing dog walker how to get to the roof of a 40-story luxury high-rise building on Riverside Boulevard on the Upper West Side at around 8am Saturday morning. Minutes later, she plummeted to her death.

Police have confirmed that the analyst was undergoing treatment for depression, but she left no suicide note. The death is not being treated as suspicious.

Ms Fashano friends were understandably shocked. The New York Times quotes one who said: 'She just had everything someone could want to be successful. She was always the leader, had everything organised'.

Our thoughts go out to Ms Fashano's family.

The analyst's death echoes the tragic suicide of Anjool Malde, a 24-year-old Deutsche banker with a great future ahead of him, who jumped off the terrace of the Coq D'Argent restaurant in London in July 2009, after a prank at work is said to have backfired.

In July, 2006, a Citigroup Russian bond trader leaped to his death from the 16th floor of one of the firm's buildings in London's Canary Wharf district.

news.hereisthecity.com/news/business_news/12043.cntns

[sandi66]

Maliki to announce Iraq government formation

Monday, December 20, 2010 12:28 GMT


Iraqi Cabinet spokesman Ali Al Dabbagh announced that Prime Minister-designate Nuri Al Maliki will announce the new government formation in today’s Parliament session.

Al Maliki will announce the government formation in exception for Defense and Interior Ministries, Al Maliki told Speaker Ousama Al Nujaifi according to an informed political source.

Prime Minister-designate will take responsibility of these ministries as an acting minister until Thursday the time to vote for the names in the parliament session, the source speaking on condition of anonymity said.


www.alsumaria.tv/en/Iraq-News/1-57820-Maliki-to-announce-Iraq-government-formation.html

[sandi66]

Wall Street Journal: Iraqi Prime Minister Presents Cabinet

Posted: December 20, 2010
by Justhopin in Iraqi Dinar/Politics

BAGHDAD—Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who won a second mandate last month as part of a U.S.-backed power-sharing deal, presented his cabinet lineup to parliament Monday, taking the first major concrete step toward ending a grinding political crisis that consumed the country for more than nine months since the inconclusive March polls.
“I am very happy,” Mr. Maliki told reporters during a brief press conference with Osama al-Nujaifi, the parliament speaker.
Mr. Nujaifi said parliament will convene Tuesday to review and vote on Mr. Maliki’s next cabinet which, in addition to the premiership, will include 41 portfolios, the largest number in Iraq’s history.
Parliament will also take up discussion of the next government’s program according to Mr. Nujaifi.
Underscoring the rifts that continue to plague Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic political factions that will participate in the next government, several posts like the crucial defense and interior ministries will be filled by interim ministers for the time being because of disagreements over who would get them, according to Mr. Malik

[sandi66]

BREAKING NEWS: ALLAWI HAS BEEN VOTED IN BY PARLIAMENT TO HEAD THE STRATEGIC COUNSEL. MALIKI DELIVERED TONIGHT THE NAMES OF 42 MINISTERS. NO PROXIES. THE US EMBASSY IS HAVING A CELEBATORY DINNER TONIGHT IN HONOR OF THE FORMING OF THE NEW GOVT AND THE OFFICIAL VOTE WILL COME 12 PLUS THE 2ND HRNAJAFI CALLS ON ALL MP'S TO ATTEND THE VOTE. OK ALL DONE

[sandi66]

The Coming Iraqi Business Boom

Foreigners can own 100 percent of Iraqi companies, must pay only a 15% flat tax on profits, and may take 100% of those profits home when and how they please.

By BARTLE BULL

The expected announcement of Iraq's new government marks the culmination of a remarkable process. The former bully-boy of the Arab neighborhood has become its only functional democracy. What may be the world's richest resource economy, once the closed shop of a murderous clique, is today wide open for business.

Driven by what many geologists consider the world's largest oil reserves, Iraq will probably be the world's biggest crude oil producer within a decade. The country currently ranks second to Saudi Arabia in official reserves, with 143 billion barrels. With much of Iraq's exploration still to come after a three-decade hiatus, and with Saudi Arabia's reserves substantially inflated and already in decline, Iraq could take the mantle as No. 1 in fairly short order.
Iraq last year signed 12 oil contracts that promise to take output from under two million barrels per day currently—less than Algeria—to over 12 million by 2016. This timeline is probably optimistic, but the contracts will likely see Iraq surpass Saudi Arabia's 10 million to 11 million barrels per day within a decade. And these figures include no contributions from Iraqi Kurdistan, from natural gas reserves, or from new oil fields, with which the lightly-explored country is replete.

The Saudi comparison suggests that as Iraq's oil production rises, its economy could grow approximately six-fold over the coming decade—gross domestic product is currently $66 billion—and add a mind-boggling $300 billion in annual GDP. This means one of the largest economic reconstruction and development booms in history.

The entire Iraqi economy is being rebuilt. The government's electricity program has a $50 billion price tag. Baghdad has awarded the reconstruction of Sadr City to six Turkish companies at a cost of $11 billion. Nationwide, thousands of police stations, schools and clinics will be built. Airports, bridges, dams, railways and roads are being planned. The $20 billion Al Faw port project will create the leading port in the Persian Gulf. A modern army, air force and navy will be trained and armed. The investment programs of last year's 12 oil deals alone add up to well more than $200 billion.

The holy cities of Najaf and Karbala currently receive more annual visitors than Mecca but have almost no hotel space or modern residential facilities. Iraq's real-estate sector generally is warming up, with Abu Dhabi companies alone committing over $65 billion in the last year. New refineries, cement plants and steel mills are being financed across the country.

Iraq's greatest resource is its famously resourceful, tough, educated and enterprising people. Whereas the capitals of the Gulf oil monarchies did not have paved streets a generation or two ago, Baghdad and Basra are ancient capitals of commerce, ideas and global finance.

Oil, people and history are not Iraq's only advantages. One of the important food-exporting countries of world history, watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Iraq possesses abundant agricultural potential. Located at the head of the Persian Gulf, Iraq is poised to regain its ancient role as a trade link between East and West. A modern rail system linking the Gulf to Europe via Turkey will provide Asian exports a faster, safer and cheaper alternative to the Suez Canal and the Horn of Africa.

Perhaps most important of all, Iraq's is a free economy. There is no ruling family, party or tribe in Iraq, and there is no culture of religious imposition.

There is strong evidence that Iraq can avoid much of the "oil curse" and build a more cosmopolitan and modern economy than those of its autocratic neighbors. In the last election, senior Iraqi leaders campaigned on, among other things, establishing individual oil accounts for Iraq citizens to receive their share of the nation's wealth directly. Unique among the region's resource economies, this would put the state at the mercy of the people, not the other way around.

The quality of Iraq's economic management is visible in the soundness of its macroeconomic picture. Inflation is under control at 5% per year, the government budget will likely be balanced with increased exports in 2011, and the Iraqi dinar (soon to appreciate as exports take off) has held steady against the U.S. dollar since early 2009. GDP growth, forecast by the International Monetary Fund to be 11.5% for 2011, is already among the highest in the world, with the investment boom barely in its infancy and the export surge yet to begin.

Corruption, of course, is a problem. But Iraq's oil industry, which accounts for 80% of the economy, is one of the world's most transparent. Last year's auctions were subject to competitive bidding, the contract terms were announced publicly, and the bids were opened live on national television.
To followers of extractive industries, it was previously unimaginable that this could happen outside of a few highly developed countries like Norway or Australia. This year Iraq was accepted on the membership track for the international Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. It is the only Middle Eastern oil country even to apply.

Violence in Iraq is now mostly a criminal matter. Over the past two years, the country has suffered fewer than 40% of the deaths by violence that Mexico has. Iraqi fatalities are now well below the levels seen during the quiet months immediately following the U.S invasion in 2003. A visit to Baghdad or Basra today isn't intimidating for businessmen accustomed to Lagos or Rio de Janeiro.

Bureaucracy is Iraq's biggest problem. Incorporating local entities is expensive and time-consuming. Obtaining a visitor's visa is absurdly difficult for a country requiring so much foreign investment. And numerous ministries and government agencies frequently claim authority over simple business matters. But the big picture for foreign companies is positive, as Iraq has a substantially more modern and liberal regulatory framework than almost any nearby country. Foreigners can own 100% of Iraqi companies, must pay only the 15% flat tax that the rest of the economy pays on profits, and may take 100% of those profits home when and how they please.
Nine months has been a long time to wait for a new government, but the process has happened peacefully and constitutionally. That's far more encouraging than all the country's oil reserves together.

Mr. Bull, a former journalist, is a founder of Northern Gulf Partners, an Iraq-focused investment bank.

online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc8m9DHxH4E


ty Chas

[sandi66]

Department of Justice Press Release

For Immediate Release
December 17, 2010 United States Attorney's Office
Southern District of New York
Contact: [phone]
Former Hedge Fund Manager Sentenced in Manhattan Federal Court to Six Years in Prison for Insider Trading

NEW YORK—A former hedge fund portfolio manager, was sentenced today to six years in prison in connection with an insider trading scheme that resulted in more than $7 million in profits, announced Preet Bharara, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. After a three week trial, Joseph Contorinis was found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and seven counts of securities fraud. Contorinis was sentenced in Manhattan federal court by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Sullivan.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: "Today's sentence of six years in prison for a hedge fund portfolio manager who traded on inside information should make plain that there will be serious consequences for those who corrupt the securities markets to line their own pockets. Together with our law enforcement partners at the FBI, we will continue to work methodically to root out insider trading and corporate corruption."

According to the documents previously filed in this case in federal court and the evidence introduced at trial, from 2004 through June 2006, Contorinis, then a portfolio manager of a hedge fund at an investment advisory firm, executed securities trades based on material, non-public information about mergers and acquisitions that Contorinis received from Nicos A. Stephanou, who was working as an investment banker in New York and London. Contorinis and Stephanou had a close personal friendship. Contorinis knew that Stephanou was tipping him in violation of Stephanou's duty of confidentiality to his employer and its clients.

For example, from late 2005 through early 2006, Stephanou was part of the investment banking team representing a private equity firm that was interested in acquiring Albertson's Inc., a supermarket chain. During the course of the transaction, Stephanou provided real-time information to Contorinis about positive and negative developments on the deal, sometimes during late night and early morning telephone conversations. Contorinis then executed trades based on that information and made profits for his hedge fund exceeding $7 million.

During the same period of time, Stephanou also tipped his friends Michael Koulouroudis and George Paparrizos about material, non-public information relating to the mergers and acquisitions of several public companies. Stephanou, Koulouroudis, and Paparrizos previously pled guilty.

In addition to the prison term, Judge Sullivan sentenced Contorinis, 46, of New York, to two years of supervised release and ordered forfeiture in the amount of at least $12 million.

U.S. Attorney Bharara praised the investigative work of the FBI. He thanked the Securities and Exchange Commission for its assistance in this matter. He also thanked UBS for its assistance in the investigation and prosecution.

This case was brought in coordination with President Barack Obama's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, on which U.S. Attorney Bharara serves as a co-chair of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Working Group. President Obama established the interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to wage an aggressive, coordinated, and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. The task force includes representatives from a broad range of federal agencies, regulatory authorities, inspectors general, and state and local law enforcement who, working together, bring to bear a powerful array of criminal and civil enforcement resources. The task force is working to improve efforts across the federal executive branch, and with state and local partners, to investigate and prosecute significant financial crimes, ensure just and effective punishment for those who perpetrate financial crimes, combat discrimination in the lending and financial markets, and recover proceeds for victims of financial crimes.

This case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney Office's Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew L. Fish and Reed M. Brodsky are in charge of the prosecution.



newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/nyfo121710a.htm



remember Jeffries alone NSS CMKX over 111 billion shares, as presented to the courts years ago.

[sandi66]

The Biggest Looting Heist in American History

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XHvg2iUGXw


ty joye

[sandi66]

Crisis Dominoes Start Falling With Lehman Auditor


December 20, 10:52 AM EDT | By Matt Taibbi

It took more than two years, but there might finally be some capital sentences handed out for crimes committed during the financial crisis. That’s metaphorically speaking, of course. Like the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, whose head was sacrificed during the Enron debacle, the once-proud financial auditing firm Ernst and Young now looks poised to take a spin down the toilet of history thanks to its role in the Lehman Brothers debacle.

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is about to file civil fraud charges against E&Y for the work it did helping Lehman cook its books during 2007 and 2008. The short version of what happened goes something like this. Lehman Brothers, like all the other big banks on Wall Street in those years, was nearing insolvency and desperate for cash. In advance of its quarterly reports in 2007, the firm executed a series of something called Repo 105 transactions in an attempt to make their balance sheet look healthier than it was.

These Repo 105 transactions are just loans that Ernst and Young and Lehman Brothers conspired to book as revenue from sales. If I go to you and I ask you to lend me a hundred bucks to pay for Knicks tickets, that’s a loan, and you and I and the SEC and every investor on Wall Street all know I’m in debt to you, that I owe you a hundred bucks.

Here’s how Lehman Brothers paid for their Knicks tickets: a week before the game, they went to you and offered to you “sell” you their worthless puke-stained lava lamp for a hundred bucks, with the understanding that two days after the Knicks game, it would come back and “buy” the lamp back for the same $100 (plus a small commission for your trouble). And when Lehman pocketed that $100 from the initial transaction, they decided to call that not borrowing but a true sale, i.e. they booked that hundred bucks as revenue from an honest sale of a worthless piece-of-shit lava lamp.

n 2007 and 2008 Lehman would do this before the end of every quarter. They would "sell" billions of dollars of assets, typically bonds, to various companies, and use that money to pay down debt before the quarter’s end, so that they didn’t look so flat-ass broke to investors. Then, a week or so after the end of the quarter, they would go out and borrow more money, and then "buy" the assets back. The reasons they did this were myriad, but in most cases the assets they were "selling" were depressed in value at the time and could not have been sold at anything like face value had they really gone out on the market and tried. So instead of really "selling" these items on their balance sheet, they worked together with other companies to jury-rig these “repurchase” agreements that looked like sales but were actually loans.

Lehman was doing massive amounts of these deals every quarter. In the second quarter of 2008, they lightened up their balance sheets with $50 billion worth of Repo agreements. This technique, apparently known as "window dressing," isn’t that much different conceptually from the Enron-style book-doctoring that used "independent" special purpose vehicles to hide liabilities. In this case Lehman didn’t use shell companies but instead just scattered debt in the financial atmosphere by booking loans as sales. Ernst and Young, which made over $100 million in fees between 2001 and 2008 working with Lehman, aided the process by signing off on Lehman’s crazy accounting. In the report by bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas that came out last March, he describes how Ernst and Young threw up a brilliant "We’re not corrupt, we’re just incredibly stupid" defense when confronted with the question of the $50 billion in Repo 105s in the second quarter of 2008. The report (a PDF of which you can view here) talks about what E&Y’s Lehman auditor Hillary Hansen had to say when future E&Y whistleblower Michael Lee confronted her about the $50 billion in Repos:

During the Examiner’s interview of Hansen, Hansen recalled that while Ernst & Young questioned Lee about his May 16, 2008 letter, Lee "rattled off" a list of additional issues and concerns he held, one of which was Lehman’s use of Repo 105 transactions. Ernst & Young had no further conversations with Lee about Repo 105 transactions. Prior to her interview of Lee in June 2008, Hansen had heard the term Repo 105 “thrown around” but she did not know its meaning…

In other words, the lead auditor reviewing one of the world’s largest investment banks had no idea what a series of regularly-occurring billion-dollar transactions committed by her main client were, and apparently wasn’t interested. It also didn’t seem to bother E&Y that Lehman was not disclosing any of this to its investors in its SEC filings.

My guess is that this suit is the beginning of the end for Ernst and Young and, who knows, may be the beginning of a series of investigations that ultimately take down the auditors and ratings agencies that made the financial crisis possible. Without accountants and raters signing off on all the bogus derivative math and bad bookkeeping, a lot of this mess would never have happened. Zero Hedge has an excellent piece detailing all the ass-covering and finger-pointing going on at Ernst and Young; check it out if you have time.

www.rollingstone.com/politics/blo....uditor-20101220



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[sandi66]

Press Release

For Immediate Release
December 17, 2010 FBI New York
Contact: Richard Kolko, [phone]
Contact: Jim Margolin, [phone]
Full Remarks as Prepared for Assistant Director in Charge Janice K. Fedarcyk for Press Conference on Agreement to Recover $7.2 Billion for Victims of Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme From Estate of Jeffry M. Picower

Just over two years ago, we learned of the massive investment fraud scheme at Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities that spanned at least three decades. There were thousands of investors, including individuals who were so taken in by Bernard Madoff’s confidence game that they invested the bulk of their net worth with him. Universities and charitable organizations also invested and were defrauded.

The unprecedented settlement announced today is in part the result of forensic accounting work done by the Trustee and the FBI to determine who were the net winners in the Madoff scheme, and the size of their fictitious profits.

In excess of seven billion dollars will now be added to amounts already recovered, making the hope of significant financial restitution for Madoff victims a reality. People who two years ago faced the devastating prospect of losing everything now stand to recover about half their investment.

And the concerted effort continues to find and recover every available penny.

When people are victimized by a financial fraud, justice consists not only of making restitution, but also vigorous investigation to hold accountable all who are criminally responsible.

We knew early on that a fraud of this magnitude could not have been the work of one person, and the investigation to date has borne that out. Seven defendants other than Bernard Madoff have been charged with serious offenses for their roles in carrying out and propping up the scheme.

The Madoff Investment Securities business was a web of deception that required a cast of supporting players. And just as the effort to locate assets continues, so does the effort to determine who else may be criminally responsible.

Today is a good day for a group of people who haven’t had much cause for optimism.



newyork.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel10/nyfo121710.htm

[sandi66]

... 2 articles [from today] copied below - >


search.bloomberg.com/search?site=wnews&client=wnews&output=xml_no_dtd&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=p&getfields=wnnis&sort=date:D:S:d1&lr=-lang_ja&proxystylesheet=noir_wnews&q=WELLS+FARGO





Wells Fargo Agrees to Make Loan Modifications Worth $2 Billion

Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Wells Fargo & Co. agreed to provide loan modifications
worth more than $2 billion to California homeowners ...
- 2010-12-20







Wells Fargo Agrees to $2 Billion in Loan Modifications (Update1)

... reduction, term extension, forgiveness on tax and insurance advances, as well as
principal forgiveness, Teri Schrettenbrunner, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said ...
- 2010-12-20







BofA, Lenders Face Possible NJ Foreclosure Freeze (Update3)

... Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, also covers Citigroup Inc.’s mortgage unit, Ally
Financial Inc.’s GMAC mortgage unit, OneWest Bank and Wells Fargo & Co. ...
- 2010-12-20


_________________________________________________________________

noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=anj3axBHCFGo


Wells Fargo Agrees to Make Loan Modifications Worth $2 Billion



By Vivek Shankar


Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Wells Fargo & Co. agreed to provide loan modifications worth more than $2 billion to California homeowners with “pick-a-pay” loans and to pay an additional $32 million to borrowers who lost their homes through foreclosure, Jerry Brown, the state’s attorney general, said on his website.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Vivek Shankar at [e-mail]

Last Updated: December 20, 2010 14:29 EST
__________________________________________________________________

noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aVJW9l9a36gQ


Wells Fargo Agrees to $2 Billion in Loan Modifications (Update1)


By Joel Rosenblatt and Dakin Campbell


Dec. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Wells Fargo & Co. agreed to provide loan modifications worth more than $2 billion to California homeowners who have “pick-a-pay” loans, California Attorney General Jerry Brown said.



Wells Fargo, the largest U.S. home lender, also will pay $32 million to borrowers whose homes were lost in foreclosure, Brown said today in a statement.



Pick-a-pay, or pay option adjustable-rate mortgage loans, allowed borrowers to make payments at various levels, according to Brown.



The highest level fully covered the monthly interest and principal due, while another level covered interest only. At the minimum level, payments were insufficient to cover the monthly interest owed, with unpaid interest added to the loan balance.



“Customers were offered adjustable-rate loans with payments that mushroomed to amounts that ultimately thousands of borrowers could not afford,” Brown said in the statement. “Recognizing the harm caused by these loans, Wells Fargo accepted responsibility and entered into this settlement with my office.”



The mortgages at issue stem from the marketing and origination practices at World Savings Bank, a unit of Golden West Financial Corp. that was acquired by Wachovia Corp. before its 2008 merger with Wells Fargo, the bank said in an e-mailed statement.



‘Prevent Foreclosures’

“The majority of Wachovia’s Pick-a-Payment customers reside in California,” Mike Heid, co-president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, said in an e-mailed statement. “We’re pleased that going forward the attorney general’s office will assist with outreach, so that we can continue to work with as many customers as possible on the options available to them to prevent foreclosures.”



The bank, based in San Francisco, said in its statement that the amount of the agreement for homeowners whose homes were foreclosed was $33 million.



The $2 billion is total relief expected to be provided to California homeowners, which can include some combination of interest rate reduction, term extension, forgiveness on tax and insurance advances, as well as principal forgiveness, Teri Schrettenbrunner, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, said in a phone interview.



From Jan 2009 to last November, Wells Fargo forgave $2.9 billion in principle on home loans in California, according to the bank’s statement.





To contact the reporter on this story: Joel Rosenblatt in San Francisco at [e-mail]; Dakin Campbell in San Francisco at [e-mail].

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David E. Rovella at [e-mail].


Last Updated: December 20, 2010 15:27 EST
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