Is forex market controlled by someone? - page 16

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UBS suspends US-based forex trader in manipulation probe

UBS AG has suspended a spot trader on its New York foreign exchange desk, a source familiar with the investigation said on Friday amid an ongoing international probe of big forex dealers for potential collusion and market manipulation.

Michael Velardi, 52, who has worked for the bank for nearly 20 years, was suspended this week, the source said. When reached by phone, Velardi declined to comment.

A spokesman for UBS declined to comment.

The source said up to six UBS traders, including Velardi, have been suspended this week as the Swiss bank tries to stay ahead of the wide-ranging probe.

Authorities in the United States, Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Singapore are looking into allegations of collusion and manipulation of the $5.3 trillion a day global forex market. They are examining not only whether traders from different banks worked together to influence currency prices, but also whether they traded ahead of their own customers or failed to accurately represent to customers how they were determining the prices.

The suspension of up to six traders at UBS this week brings the total number of FX traders suspended, placed on leave or fired to around 30. Of that total, UBS accounts for seven.

source

 

After years of probes, SEC fraud trial over Texas tycoons to start

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission faces off against wealthy Texas investor Samuel Wyly and the estate of his late brother, Charles, this week in a trial over long-standing accusations that they engaged in a $550 million fraud.

Jury selection is set to begin Monday in a federal court in New York in what is expected to biggest test this year of the SEC's ability to hold individuals accountable at trial, following a recent series of disappointing verdicts in fraud and insider trading cases.

The trial is the culmination of years of litigation and investigations by the SEC of the Wylys. The case has continued even after Charles Wyly died in a car crash in August 2011, with his estate substituted for him.

The SEC accuses the Wylys of concealing stock trading from 1992 to 2004 in Sterling Software Inc, Michaels Stores Inc, Sterling Commerce Inc, and Scottish Annuity & Life Holdings Ltd through the use of offshore trusts and entities.

The SEC also contends the Wylys earned $31.7 million from insider trading in Sterling Software after deciding to sell the company in 1999.

The Wylys have denied wrongdoing, saying they were not the beneficial owners of the stock held in the trusts, which they say were established for their families for tax purposes. The Wylys also have said they were advised by their lawyer that they did not need to disclose the trusts' holdings and sales.

So old is the case that the law has shifted under the SEC, after a U.S. Supreme Court case last year restricted it from pursuing civil penalties for much of the period in question.

As a result, the case has been cut in two, with part of the lawsuit to be heard by U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin after the jury rules in the first part. The jury will consider charges stemming from the failure to disclose the trusts and the trading in them.

The judge will decide the insider trading claims and will also determine any penalty that might be warranted from the jury's verdict.

The SEC and Samuel Wyly had been engaged in settlement talks ahead of trial, with the regulator demanding an admission of wrongdoing as part of its shift in settlement terms under Chair Mary Jo White.

But Samuel Wyly, 79, and his brother's estate decided instead to go to trial, despite facing what their lawyer Stephen Susman in court in February called a "huge" demand for money running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Susman declined to comment.

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Deutsche puts FX sales director in London on leave -source

Deutsche Bank AG, the world's largest currency trader, has placed on leave a director of institutional foreign exchange sales as part of an internal investigation into potential exchange rate manipulation, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday.

Kai Lew, based in London and responsible for central bank FX business at the German lender, was placed on leave earlier this month, the source said.

She is the first woman among some 30 currency traders at several big banks to be placed on leave, suspended or fired as a result of the ongoing global probe into alleged wrongdoing in the $5.3 trillion-a-day market, the world's largest.

There is no evidence of wrongdoing.

A spokeswoman for Deutsche declined to comment, referring Reuters to a previous statement from the bank that read: "Deutsche Bank has received requests for information from regulatory authorities that are investigating trading in the foreign exchange market. The bank is cooperating with those investigations, and will take disciplinary action with regards to individuals if merited."

Lew could not be immediately reached for comment.

Lew joined Deutsche in February 2006 from Goldman Sachs , where she had been for six years in London, Hong Kong and Singapore, according to her LinkedIn page.

This news comes on the same day Swiss and British regulators stepped up their scrutiny of alleged manipulation of FX markets.

Switzerland's competition commission WEKO said it formally opened an investigation into several Swiss, British and U.S. banks including JP Morgan, Barclays and Citi .

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), meanwhile, said it will assess if banks have cut the risk of traders manipulating benchmark rates in the coming year, to see if lessons have been learned from the scandal over benchmark rate rigging.

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I did not believe this market is full random.(maybe random at between sessions )..the obvius indicator is stop hunting..they hunt stops in almost every timeframe...That means trends for lower timeframes if it is done at higher timeframes...In a world there are rich people who have more than 100 million$ they just never let that big money act randomly..I mean tell me one thing that you can t do with 100 million $ rather than 1 billion$...There is nothing but they still want more...Our job is very hard..It is like a war between ancient human and today modern soldier with technologic guns...

 

Credit Suisse faces threat of new U.S. tax probe

Credit Suisse faces the threat of a new investigation into its role in helping wealthy Americans avoid paying taxes after New York state's top financial regulator requested documents from the Swiss bank.

Switzerland's second-largest lender had raised expectations it was putting the long-running American tax controversy behind it when it set aside an extra half a billion dollars last week to deal with a U.S. Department of Justice probe into its involvement in offshore tax evasion.

But Benjamin Lawsky, New York's financial services superintendent, is now examining whether the bank lied to New York authorities about creating tax shelters, raising the prospect of a new probe, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Shares in Credit Suisse dropped 2.2 percent to 28.82 Swiss francs in Zurich on Monday as investors digested the possibility of a costly investigation.

"There is still a lot of uncertainty around all these legal issues at Credit Suisse. Nobody can tell how much it will really cost in the end," said Peter Stenz, portfolio manager of Swiss equities at Swisscanto, one of the 50 largest stakeholders in Credit Suisse.

Credit Suisse has so far set aside 895 million francs ($1 billion) to deal with tax and securities law matters in the United States, above the $780 million Swiss rival UBS paid in 2009 to settle charges it sheltered U.S. citizens from the taxman.

After years of stalemate as Bern and Washington clashed over a wider tax dispute, there have been recent signs that Credit Suisse was closing in on a deal with U.S. authorities.

In February, the bank reached a 196 million franc settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a related tax dispute and a few days later Chief Executive Brady Dougan apologized to U.S. senators for the bank's misconduct but blamed it on a small group of rogue bankers and said it stopped in 2008.

While the Department of Justice has considered a deferred-prosecution agreement that would suspend any indictment in exchange for a large cash penalty, it is also pushing for a guilty plea from a Credit Suisse subsidiary, according to a New York Times report on Sunday.

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This thread is very informative thanks for sharing..

 

Of course that it is controlled : do we really believe that they would let us (the people) control something so important for for their incomes as forex just by letting the market regulate itself? That would be what they call a "communism" and that is what scares them the most

 

Retiring SEC Lawyer Crucifies His Employer: "It's A Cancer"

We wonder: why does the truth about the broken system, as witnessed and experienced by individual employees, always wait until said employee is about to depart their employer or just after? Obviously that is rhetorical. However, it is worth mentioning, because in the latest such revelation, a retiring SEC trail attorney veteran, James Kidney, who had been with the agency since 1986 and retired this month, just crucified his now former employer for doing precisely all those thing that outside critics - notably Zero Hedge - have accused the most co-opted, clueless, corrupt and criminal regulators of doing. Only he said it in a way that not even we could have phrased.

From Bloomberg:

The SEC has become “an agency that polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors,”Kidney said, according to a copy of his remarks obtained by Bloomberg News. “On the rare occasions when enforcement does go to the penthouse, good manners are paramount. Tough enforcement, risky enforcement, is subject to extensive negotiation and weakening.”

Kidney said his superiors were more focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service than on bringing difficult cases. The agency’s penalties, Kidney said, have become “at most a tollbooth on the bankster turnpike.”

Wow: another "erudite" former cog in the systemic wheel goes off the reservation and gets all tinfoil bloggy on us. He goes on:

In his speech, Kidney also hit the agency for using misleading statistics to showcase its enforcement efforts. The SEC should focus on the quality of its actions, rather than try to file as many as possible just to tout its record to lawmakers and the media, he said.

“It is a cancer,” Kidney said of the agency’s use of numbers. “It should be changed.”

His name was James Kidney.

Kidney said in the interview that he will always be an SEC loyalist and was trying to offer constructive criticism that could help the agency. He said he wasn’t singling out any specific cases or officials in his comments.

“I don’t think we did a very aggressive job with all the major players in the crash of ’08,” he said, noting that as a civil enforcement agency, the commission does not need to prove its cases beyond a reasonable doubt like the Justice Department does. “The SEC has a lower burden of proof and we should be pushing the envelope a bit.”

You mean, pretending to regulate the same people where SEC staffers wish to work will no longer fool most of the people all of the time? The horror... The horror.

A quick reminder on the Goldman wrist slap deal with the SEC, where Kidney was part of the initial,if not final team.

Kidney, who was part of the initial team that was building the Goldman Sachs case, pressed his bosses in the enforcement division to go higher up the chain. He later took himself off the team after being given a lesser role, according to people familiar with the matter.

In particular, the people said, Kidney argued that the commission should sue Tourre’s boss, Jonathan Egol. Kidney also wanted to bring a case against Paulson & Co. or some executives at the hedge fund, which helped pick the portfolio of securities that were underlying the Abacus vehicle and then bet against it.

The SEC ultimately decided not to sue Egol, the Paulson firm or any individuals from the hedge fund.

Yes, it was allthe not even 30 year old Tourre's fault. All of it. And the person who dared to point out this criminal disdain for justice by the SEC? He was demoted by the most corrupt of all: Mary Schapiro.

The punchline - the SEC is a regulator only for optical purposes. It's true role is not to shake up the status quo.

In his retirement speech, Kidney noted that he had been “involved in a high-profile case or two” and said he had gotten a message from above not to take too many risks.

“I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses, whose names we all know, who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket,” Kidney said. “They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances.”

Simply said: disgusting and pathetic - both the sad truth about the US market "regulator", which most were already aware of, andthat an SEC employee has to wait until the day he quits to express it.

Oh, and if anyone still wants to know why the perfectly legal parasitism of HFT has turned off the retail investors for the last time, and why everyone knows the market is rigged - it is not the vacuum tubes. Nope. It is the criminals at the SEC who made it legal for 25 year old math PhDs to rig stocks in the first place, and who allowed the TBTF banks to make the marketplace into their own personal no risk, all return piggy bank. Them, and of course Congress - because when the day comes that all those idiotic trades blow up and the banks have to pay the penalty, why - they just get another taxpayer bailout, courtesy of America's democratically elected "representatives."source

 

Ex-Goldman director Gupta to surrender June 17 in insider case

Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc (GS.N) director Rajat Gupta is expected to begin his two-year prison term on June 17 for insider trading.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan directed Gupta to surrender by 2:00 p.m. EDT on that date to start serving his sentence at an institution chosen by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, according to an order issued on Thursday.

Gupta, 65, was convicted in June 2012 on securities fraud and conspiracy charges for having fed tips, from Goldman board meetings in the second half of 2008, to longtime friend Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund firm.

A three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction on March 25, rejecting Gupta's claim that Rakoff improperly admitted wiretap evidence at trial.

Two weeks later, on April 8, Gupta asked the panel to reconsider, or for the entire 2nd Circuit to review the case.

Gary Naftalis, a lawyer for Gupta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan had no immediate comment.

Gupta is also a former global managing director of the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

He is the top corporate official convicted in a broad federal insider trading probe unveiled in October 2009, when charges against Rajaratnam were announced.

Rajaratnam is appealing his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court. He is serving an 11-year prison term.

The government has won about 80 convictions and guilty pleas in the probe. On April 11, a federal judge approved a guilty plea by Steven Cohen's SAC Capital Advisors LP to resolve criminal insider trading charges, including a $1.2 billion penalty.

The case is U.S. v. Gupta, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 11-cr-00907.

source

 

There is no way how we can avoid controlled market

All we are allowed in live trading is long term trading - all the others will be trapped

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