BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Moore Capital all are connected to the biggest-ever, "insider trading" raid ever conducted in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday March 23rd 2010, British regulators and the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency used more than 140 personnel to raid sixteen locations and initially arrest six people.

The identities of the six arrested are a bit sketchy still. One is said to be Clive Roberts, head of European sales trading at Exaine, in which BNP Paribas owns a fifty percent stake. At least one of those arrested was also employed at Moore Capital in London – supposedly a Mr. Julian Rifat. Another individual is said to be a junior employee at Deutsche Bank. The identities and affiliations of the other three arrested were not initially known.

According to a subsequent FSA press conference, Exaine, Moore Capital and Deutsche Bank employees apparently used inside information to trade for their firms and/or themselves, and have made significant profits as a result. This again apparently was a 'sophisticated and long running insider trading ring. The UK investigation began back in 2007 and is continuing.

Money manager Stanley Chais and "entities" associated with him are apparently under criminal investigation stemming from the Bernard Madoff affair. Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") previously wrote about Mr. Chais in the post Stanley Chais, A Fund Feeder to Bernie Madoff.

Late on Friday December 11th 2009 various news services are reporting that prosecutors from the Southern District of New York made a formal request to intervene in a civil lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to Bloomberg News, “The government’s criminal investigation seeks to determine whether Chais and others have violated various federal criminal statutes,” including conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering, Assistant U.S. Attorney William Stellmach wrote in a legal brief. Prosecutors think they will decide whether to charge Chais or businesses related to him by mid-June, Stellmach wrote.

Late on Friday July 10th 2009, Joseph Collins, a Mayer Brown law partner since 1994, was convicted of securities fraud and other criminal charges in a financial cover-up that brought down the one-time commodity trading giant Refco back in the fall of 2005. A federal jury in New York found Attorney Collins guilty on five of 14 counts, including two counts of wire fraud, two counts of securities fraud and conspiracy, according to the U.S. attorney's office in New York. A mistrial was declared on nine other counts. Collins is scheduled to be sentenced on November 3rd.

The Chicago Tribune has more information on this case here. The verdict ended a trial that lasted nearly two months and took some unexpected turns. In the middle of the trial, the judge presiding over the case became sick and had to be replaced. Apparently, "After the verdict was returned today, two jurors who declined to provide their names told Bloomberg News that the male juror pointed frequently at panel members. The two jurors said deliberations were otherwise uneventful. The jurors said the vote was 11-1 to convict on the remaining nine counts. The holdout was the juror who pointed at the others. That juror wanted a mistrial, they said."

Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") has previously written a number of blog posts about the Refco Scandal and Mayer Brown's possible involvement. Those posts can be found here and here.

According to Bloomberg News, Sergey Aleynikov, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. computer programmer arrested last week for stealing software, told an FBI agent he uploaded proprietary code to an encrypted server he had used on “multiple occasions.” Mr. Aleynikov, 39, told the agent about 1 a.m. on July 4 that he had logged into Goldman’s computers through remote access from his home and sent encrypted files to a repository server with the URL identifier svn.xp-dev.com, according to a copy of his FBI statement in court files in Manhattan federal court.

The Bloomberg News story goes on to explain that Xp-dev.com is run by a London resident Roopinder Singh, who describes himself on a blog linked to the website as "a trading systems developer working in London's financial services industry". That website offers "subversion hosting." Subversion, commonly referred to by the acronym SVN, is a common version of source control software that allows users to track current and previous versions of programming code and other documents. [Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") uses two competing products known as CVS and Microsoft Visual SourceSafe to manage its programming source files that are part of either internal or client projects.]

On July 9th 2009, another legal shoe dropped in the case of Sergey Aleynikov and his would be new employer Teza Technologies. Ken Griffin's Citadel Investment Group is now suing its former head of high-frequency trading Misha Malysev and two other former employees, Jace Kohlmeier and Matthew Hinerfeld, alleging that their formation of a new trading firm violated a non-compete agreement they had with Citadel.

As The Wall Street Journal reports, "The identity of Malyshev's new firm, Teza Technologies LLC, became very public this week, when it said it hired and subsequently suspended former Goldman Sachs computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov. Aleynikov has been charged by the U.S. with stealing computer code from Goldman's high-frequency trading business. Aleynikov and his lawyer have asserted that any violation was unintentional, and that he didn't distribute any codes obtained from Goldman."

The Citadel complaint was filed in the Chancery Division of Cook County, Illinois Circuit Court. The complaint asks the court for an expedited hearing in the case, saying that Teza could cause "irreparable" harm to Citadel. It also mentions the Aleynikov affair, stating, "Teza's decision to hire Aleynikov, an accused software thief, creates a substantial risk that they have stolen, or may be planning to steal, Citadel's proprietary code."

As part of the complaint, Citadel attached copies of the non-compete agreements and resignation acceptance letters of the former employees. Malyshev's agreement states that for nine months following his February 2009 departure, he cannot start working for a "competitive enterprise" or use "quantitative analytics which are based on information that is proprietary to Citadel and which I either utilized or developed when I was employed by Citadel." The WSJ notes that Citadel's non-compete agreements are widely considered to be among the more stringent in the hedge-fund business.

On Monday July 6th 2009, various news outlets are reporting on the rather brazen bank theft by one Sergey Aleynikov. Rather than brandishing a gun or cracking a vault, Sergey hacked the algorithmic trading secrets of his then-employer Goldman Sachs by downloading proprietary, "black box" computer models that Goldman uses to execute rapid-fire trades in the financial markets. The value of this intellectual property, experts say, could be incalculable.

Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") has written extensively about the topic of Algorithmic Trading. Interested readers, for instance, might want to review the white paper entitled Market Risk and Algorithmic Trading that TCM wrote on behalf of Advanced Micro Devices some months ago. As that paper starts,

In the evolving financial markets, ever-more complex quantitative analyses are performed. Some constantly assess the market risk of portfolio exposures, while others calculate the probability of reward for various strategies in the continually shifting markets.

Increasingly, algorithmic trading programs automatically execute the trade orders that result. With the growing adoption of the AMD Opteron™ processor, high performance computing for quantitative modeling and algorithmic trading in the financial markets likely will increase.

Simulation modeling techniques quantify market risk, measuring the probability and magnitude of potential loss due to change in prices. As market liquidity decreases, typically price volatility and, hence, market risk increases. With the recent introduction of decimalization, the U.S. equity market structure dramatically changed. Trading spreads shrunk, trading venues proliferated, and market liquidity fractured. As a result, a new form of trade execution emerged: algorithmic trading.

A top story of the day on many of the news outlets is about Sergey Aleynikov, the thirty-nine year-old former vice president who allegedly stole trade secrets from Goldman Sachs and stored them on a foreign server. The breathless headlines are staggering. Code theft could cost Goldman millions, US says, To Catch a Rogue Quant, Russian Said to Be Ex-Goldman Worker Charged in Theft and The Dumbest Man at Goldman Sachs.

As President Obama visits Russia, the homeland security, terrorism and anti-immigrant blogs are abuzz about the alleged Russian spy. You have to look hard to find the headline, Goldman sees no impact from computer programmer-source. It isn’t as exciting.

Before Aleynikov is hung for international espionage, I thought it would be good to dig a little bit deeper into what happened. According to the an affidavit by Michael G. McSwain entered into the Southern District of New York, FBI agent McSwain charges Mr. Aleynikov with “unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly, without authorization, copied, duplicated, sketched, drew, photographed, downloaded, uploaded, altered, destroyed, photocopied, replicated, transmitted, delivered, sent, mailed, communicated and conveyed, a trade secret that is related to and included in a product that is produced for and place in interstate and foreign commerce with the intent to convert that trade secret to the economic benefit of someone other than the owner thereof, and intending and knowling that the offense would injure the owner of that trade secret, to wit, Aleynikov, while in New York, New York, and elsewhere, copied, without authorization, proprietary computer code belonging to a financial institution in the United States and then uploaded the code to a computer server in Germany.”

Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") first wrote about the use of credit default swaps ("CDS") as a means of insider-trading back in October 2006 in the post Possible Insider Trading Using Credit-Default Swaps?? On May 5th 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission finally filed its first case alleging that credit-default swaps were used to facilitate illegal insider-trading activities. Hopefully, this will be just the first of many such cases filed involving the abuse of insider information and the credit default swap market.

According to this story on Bloomberg News written by David Scheer, the SEC has now alleged that a Deutsche Bank AG salesman, one Jon-Paul Rorech, 36, passed on information about a pending bond sale to a now former Millennium Partners LP money manager, one Renato Negrin, 45, who then bought credit default swaps that resulted in profits of $1.2 million once the VNU high-yield bond transaction was formally announced. The securities market regulator wants these two individuals to forfeit "unlawful trading profits" and pay unspecified fines. “Rorech and Negrin checked their integrity at the door and schemed to engage in insider trading of CDS to the detriment of investors and our markets,” Scott Friestad, the SEC’s deputy enforcement director, said in the statement announcing the lawsuit.

Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") has long suspected that Ruth Madoff was an active co-conspirator with her husband Bernie Madoff in his massive Ponzi scheme. (A reader, for instance, might want to review the TCM post Ruth Madoff: Rube or Accomplice to Bernie? ) Now Federal investigators seem to agree as they are "working around the clock" to freeze the assets of Ruth Alpern Madoff.

On Sunday March 15th 2009, The New York Post published the article Ruth In Crosshair$. This article suggests that federal authorities are working feverishly to prepare a filing asking a Federal judge to formally freeze all of Ruth Madoff's more than $93 million in assets as soon as possible. "The US attorneys will be in court in the next week or so to tell a judge that they believe Mrs. Madoff's assets are derived from ill-gotten gains and that they should be frozen for a certain period of time while the investigation is ongoing," an SEC source said.

The judge will then decide whether there is sufficient reason to believe her assets were legitimately earned or whether they were the proceeds of her husband's $65 billion Ponzi scheme. "You do not need the case to be nailed down, you just need to be able to convince the judge that there is a strong probability that the funds in question came from crime," the source said.

The article continues with additional information about a possible forthcoming criminal indictment. "Law-enforcement sources also told The Post that the asset freeze would be just the first step in a one-two punch against her as prosecutors work furiously to build a criminal case." In the past week, Mrs. Madoff has had needed to part legal counsel with Ira Sorkin who now principally is representing the legal interests of her husband. Ruth Madoff's new criminal defense lawyer, Peter Chavkin, apparently declined to comment on these developments.

On Thursday March 12th 2009, Bernie Madoff pled guilty to all eleven counts associated with his vast and long-running Ponzi scheme. He did so without a plea agreement and hence did not disclose any information about who else might have been involved in the scheme. Hence, many questions remain about the small group of accounting firms that were connected with Bernie Madoff's activities in one form or another.

Ahead of the plea hearing, The New York Times published an article written by Leslie Wayne and William K. Rashbaum entitled Investigation Into Madoff Fraud Turns to a Small Circle of Accountants. This article discloses that a number of investigative agencies are making inquiries into Friehling & Horowitz, Sosnick Bell, Konigsberg Wolf & Company and Avellion & Bienes. Apparently Paul Konigsberg and Steven Mendelow, both affiliated with Konigsberg Wolf, have been subpoenaed for more information about their relationships and involvement with Bernie Madoff's fraud scheme.

In this article, Lars Toomre and Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") were quoted. The specific quote was: “Who takes their accountant on a ski trip?” said Lars Toomre, head of Toomre Capital Markets, a Greenwich, Conn., financial risk analysis firm that maintains a Web site on the Madoff scandal. “Konigsberg is always around Madoff.” (For those visitors to this website looking for more information, feel free to click one of the many links that will take you to further information.)

As TCM has written previously on this website, it is extremely unlikely that Bernie Madoff committed this massive fraud over more than twenty years without the help of others. We are likely to read in the coming weeks and months that Madoff's accountants either willingly assisted Madoff or turned a blind eye to his supposedly amazingly consistent returns. What is really amazing is that all of the accountants associated with Madoff have claimed through their lawyers that they lost "millions" in the Madoff fraud.

Has anyone paused to ask how modest accountants of rather middle-class means somehow accumulated millions of dollars through their professional services work? Toomre Capital Markets LLC is not familiar with many accountants or CPAs who became multi-millionaires through their professional work. Are you? What were the sources of the "millions" of dollars that they supposedly subsequently lost in the Madoff investment pool?

About three weeks ago, Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") wrote about Annette Bongiorno, Bernie Madoff's former long-time secretary, in the post Annette Bongiorno, Madoff Aide Falls Under Suspicion. On Monday March 9th 2009, Ms. Bongiorno is back in the news on the front page of the Markets section of The Wall Street Journal.

In the article entitled Madoff Aide Allegedly Got Fake 'Tickets' of Trading, WSJ reporter Amil Efrati reveals that Ms. Bongiorno allegedly directed two assistants to create the bogus trading "tickets." These tickets documented the purported trades, which in turn resulted in gains that were in line with Mr. Madoff's steady annual returns.

"The two assistants to Ms. Bongiorno, Semone Anderson and Winnie Jackson, did clerical work and helped generate stock-trade confirmations for client accounts, which purported to show gains that were later applied to client accounts. The confirmations are now believed to have been fictitious, according to a court-appointed trustee who is liquidating the Madoff firm. Ms. Bongiorno, 60 years old, was once Mr. Madoff's personal secretary and later oversaw some of the firm's oldest accounts. The two assistants were interviewed by the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York through what are called proffer agreements, in which prosecutors agree not to use their statements against them as long as they tell the truth, according to people familiar with the matter."

Given that Ms. Bongiorno apparently also actively raised funds for the Madoff fraud from her neighbors in Queens New York, this new information highly suggests to Toomre Capital Markets LLC that Ms. Bongiorno will likely be facing some criminal penalties of her own. Surely, if she was ordering the creation of bogus trade tickets, she must have known for some period that Bernie Madoff's investment operation was a scam. If she further profited from fees received from managing so-called "RuAnn" feeder accounts for friends from her old neighborhood, federal prosecutors are likely to come down on her hard. Of course, though, she might have some juicy information about the possible participation of say Ruth Madoff, Peter Madoff and/or either of the sons, Andy or Mark Madoff that just might mitigate her criminal penalties.

This WSJ article also reveals that Federal prosecutors have recently turned their attention to a separate group that handled many of the institutional investment accounts mired in the Madoff fraud. "That group was headed by Frank DiPascali Jr., 52, who hasn't yet been asked to speak with prosecutors, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. DiPascali's lawyer declined to comment on his client's behalf. Mr. DiPascali referred to himself as the "director of options trading" at the firm and Mr. Madoff told investors he executed trades, despite the fact that a court-appointed trustee found that no trading occurred for at least the past 13 years. Prosecutors have asked at least three employees who worked under Mr. DiPascali about his role in the firm, according to a person familiar with the matter. The employees, Eric Lipkin, JoAnn Crupi and Robert Cardile, who is Mr. DiPascali's brother-in-law, also had proffer agreements with prosecutors."

On Friday February 21st 2009, Irving Picard, the trustee liquidating Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC on behalf of Securities Investor Protection Corp. ("SIPC"), held his first meeting with investors who were defrauded by Bernie Madoff. At that meeting, Mr. Picard said "We have found no evidence to indicate that securities were purchased for customers' accounts'' for "perhaps as much as 13 years.'' It was "cash in and cash out,'' he said. In short, the detailed monthly statements sent to investors were pure fiction.

This disclosure is important to the defrauded investors since it makes it more likely that each investor will be able to recover up to $500,000 from SIPC rather than $100,000 that would be available if there were actual securities held in the Madoff accounts. "We are operating out of a crime scene,'' Picard said at the meeting. He added that his office has received 2,350 customer claims as of noon yesterday. Those claims exceeded about $US1 billion, Picard told reporters after the meeting. "That's my recollection, plus or minus,'' Picard said, adding, "I can't tell you today how many of the 2,400 claims will be allowed.''

Mr. Picard told the assembled investors that his office has located Madoff firm books and records at its Manhattan offices, the basement of its Third Avenue building, at a warehouse and at a "backup site.'' "At the warehouse, we recently inventoried approximately 7,000 boxes and that's in addition to the file cabinets worth of materials we found at the premises and that we've been able to review under the watchful eye of the FBI,'' Picard said. "We're getting a feel for how this operation worked.''

Mr. Picard also reported that he found no separation between the company's broker-dealer division and its investment advisory unit. "We have found nothing to suggest there was any difference, any separateness,'' Picard said at a meeting today with Madoff clients in US Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. "It was all one.'' Picard said he reduced overhead for the Madoff firm by about $300,000 a week. When he came in, it had about 175 or 180 employees, he told the clients. Now he has only 60, including 45 at the market-making operation, which he said are necessary. The trustee told the investors that he wants to sell the firm's market-making unit in "a matter of weeks.'' "That appears to have some value,'' he said. "We're in the process of getting some bids.''

Frank Avellino and Michael Bienes nearly fifty years ago started working at the accounting firm run by Ruth Madoff's father, Saul Alpern. Sometime around that time, they and Saul Alpern began referring clients, friends and associates to Bernie Madoff's fledging securities firm. Along the way, they formed a successor firm to the Alpern firm and then began to primarily focus on fund raising in their guaranteed notes that were in turn invested with Bernie Madoff through their firm Avellino & Bienes.

In late 1992, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued these two accountants and two others, Steven Mendelow and Edward Glantz (and his son Richard), together with their respective firms for selling unregistered notes. As a result, they disbanded their investment vehicles and supposedly returned all funds to their investors. Apparently, though, a significant number of investors then turned over their returned assets directly to Bernie Madoff where accounts at Bernard Madoff Investment Securities were opened in their names.

According to investors who have come forward after the Madoff scheme was exposed, Frank Avellino, Michael Bienes, Steven Mendelow and Richard Glantz never completely ceased raising additional funds for Bernie Madoff. While the vehicles and mechanisms they used subsequent to the SEC lawsuits are less well documented, each apparently continued to direct investors to Madoff.

Shortly after the Madoff arrest was disclosed, Michael Bienes suddenly resigned from the Board of Directors of the prestigious Broward Center for the Performing Arts in a short one sentence letter. As Bob Norman of the Broward-Palm Beach New Times writes, "Since the scheme collapsed, he and wife Dianne have dropped out of Fort Lauderdale life and, sources say, emptied their Bay Colony estate of their possessions."

The Tuesday February 27th 2009 edition of The Telegraph (London) contains an article entitled Madoff Aide Falls Under Suspicion written by James Quinn. This article concerns one Annette Bongiorno, who served as a long-time employee to Bernie Madoff and who apparently was active in recruiting friends and associates from her former Howard Beach neighborhood in the borough Queens as investors in the Madoff investment scheme.

Apparently Annette (Argese) Bongiorno lived next door to Frank DiPascali, Bernie's chief assistant and self-proclaimed chief financial officer of Madoff's investment operation. She started working for Bernard Madoff Investment Securities sometime during the 1980s when there were no more than three dozen employees and the firm was located downtown near Wall Street. During those early years, Mrs. Bongiorno was Bernie Madoff's personal secretary as well as performing various clerical duties, particularly for long-time investors with Bernie.

In more recent years, Mrs. Bongiorno apparently moved to a house worth $2.6m in Manhasset, Long Island. Her husband Rudy is a retired electrician. One might reasonably wonder how a former secretary and city electrician might be able to afford such a relatively expensive property. Perhaps it was due to the compensation from running what were known as "RuAnn" accounts? What management fees and/or commissions were paid to this couple for the funds that their friends and associates invested with Madoff? Were those fees ever disclosed to anyone?

Toomre Capital Markets LLC ("TCM") has been consumed during the few weeks doing the "real" work of our consulting company — that is serving the needs of our paying clients. As a result, with client projects occupying so much of our working day, we have had little spare time to focus further on the Bernie Madoff fraud scandal. Hence, TCM's postings on this subject have been lighter than usual and the moderated comments have not been addressed as quickly as usual.

Please bear with us as the work crunch continues a bit longer. However, even at this early hour of the morning of Thursday February 5th 2009, TCM would like to highlight two pretty remarkable events that have occurred in the past day with regard to the Bernie Madoff affair. The first concerns the quite amazing and frank testimony of Harry Markopolos in both his written testimony and his oral remarks and answers. How could anyone not admire a man long on the tail of the Bernie Madoff? And how could one not come away with a heady admiration of the way that he thoroughly dissected the regulatory failures that allowed the Madoff affair to thrive for so long?

Mr. Markopolos' written testimony is a must read!!! And in his oral testimony, he stated that there are maybe another dozen Madoff "feeder funds" lying in the weeds not yet willing to disclose their near complete losses? Who might those European funds might be? Toomre Capital Markets LLC intends to return to Mr. Markopolos' testimony in the next few days when there is a bit more free time. In the meantime, definitely read what the mainstream media has to say about the unheard Madoff whistle-blower and his Congressional testimony.

The second item that TCM would like to briefly highlight is the document that AlixPartners LLP, a Dallas company hired as the claims agent by the trustee overseeing the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities. That document was filed in New York federal court on February 4th and contains approximately 13,000 people and/or entities that have thus far been identified as either having had an active account with Bernie Madoff at the time of his arrest or had previously done so. This list of information is truly fascinating!!!