From “Front and Center”, by Bud Burrell
– This week, an 80 page internal report of the behavior of Dallas and New York FINRA staff members in actively protecting and shielding Sir Allen Stanford and his billion dollar Ponzi scheme was leaked by unidentified sources. This sickening report drove home the total absence of internal controls at FINRA related to discovering and acting on massive frauds for which they were given nearly untold numbers of signals that should have prompted their action against such parties. Near the end of the report, it was stated that the behavior of FINRA was essentially identical with regard to Bernie Madoff’s Registered Investment Advisor and his related broker-dealer.
Some years ago, I had the chance to see a brilliant and upcoming 18 year old comedian at “Catch a Rising Star”. He wrecked the audience with the description of his multi-ethnic background, saying his mother and father, who were from different ethnic groups, had met each other on the subway picking each others’ pockets.
After hearing the full stories of the way in which Madoff and Stanford each manipulated the SEC and FINRA to a point of abuse, I was reminded of this routine. The only difference was that in this case we had two RICO criminal enterprises manipulating two other Government and quasi-governmental institutional criminal enterprises, working together to pick the pockets of major investors, domestically and internationally. [entire post]