By now Bernard Madoff is old news and relegated to his prison cell. At the time he ran the largest ponzi scheme in financial history.
Not any longer.
For nearly a decade Harry Markopolos tried to get someone, anyone at the SEC to listen. It wasnt until the entire theft blew up that it finally came crashing down.
Today Madoff has a bed at Che' Big House and Harry Markopolos ... well he has found a bigger fish and it has to do with your retirement. And like Madoff its been going on for at least a decade.
This time Bernie has found a new ally.
"Attorneys general in Virginia and Florida filed civil suits against BNY Mellon alleging that the bank cheated pension funds in those states by choosing improper prices for currency trades the bank processed for the funds," The WSJ reports. "The Virginia lawsuit, filed in a Fairfax, Va., state court, cites internal bank emails allegedly showing that senior bank officials knew about, and endorsed, a currency-trading method that hurt state pensioners."
[..]In this case, Markopolos says BNY Mellon and State Street we're taking about "three tenths of a percent from every forex transaction for pension funds" by back-timing the trade to benefit banks at the detriment of their pension fund clients. "It's almost the exact same scheme as the market timing scandals of 2003," he claims.
But thanks to reports yesterday we now know why the SEC has been derelict in their duties. Its because the SEC is complicit!
For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history.
I dont know about you but we have a serious problem here. Unless we clean out Washington of the riff raff and petty front men we will never get to the real thieves.