TARP's chief cop flew to Nashville this morning to announce a guilty plea by Gordon Grigg, an unlicensed financial adviser who included claims of a special TARP sauce in his menu of fraudulent investments.
Grigg admits in the agreement that he solicited money from potential investors with the promise that it would be invested in government-backed commercial paper and bank debt as part of the TARP, although no such investment program exists under TARP.
He "falsely represented to investors that he had already committed more than $5 million in ProTrust pooled client funds towards the purchase of TARP-guaranteed debt as part of a private placement partnership between ProTrust and the investment firms Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.," the document says. It does not specify how much money, if any, Grigg actually took in under the pretense of TARP investments.
That last part may tell us how substantive Barofsky's achievement was. The plea agreement says Grigg had been running a Ponzi since 1996, so the TARP wrinkle may have been something of an afterthought.