Saturday, July 12, 2014

EPJ Week In Review - Week Ending 7/11/14










Below you'll find everything that has been published on EPJ for the week ended Friday July 11, 2014. The hottest posts for each day are highlighted in red.







Friday 7/11/14
Thursday 7/10/14
Wednesday 7/9/14
Tuesday 7/8/14
Monday 7/7/14
Sunday 7/6/14
Saturday 7/5/14
at 7:00:00 AM
Labels:

1 comment:

  1. tomJuly 12, 2014 at 1:51 PM

    Former CalPERS CEO Pleads Guilty to Bribery, Fraud, Including Taking Cash in Paper Bags

    Several readers sent accounts from the California press on the latest sordid chapter in a long-standing, large scale pay-to-play scandal at the giant California public pension fund, CalPERS. Earlier this month, state papers reported disclosed that the former CEO, Frank Buenrostro, had cut a plea bargain with Federal prosecutors and was turning evidence on his (alleged) former partner in crime, placement agent and former CalPERS board member Alfred Villalobos. We’d heard privately before that story broke that the charges against Buenrostro were about to be greatly expanded, which is likely what lead the former CEO to fold. But as a CalPERS insider told us, “It was a race to see who was going to cut a deal first.”

    For those of you outside California, a post earlier this year gives a sense of the scale of this scandal:

    CalPERS’ investments have been controversy-ridden since the early 2000s, but the “pay to play” scandal that Butka alludes to directly implicated the CEO and some board members. The former CEO, Fred Buenrostro, as well as the placement agent, Alfred Villalobos, were indicted in 2011. This is how Matt Taibbi summarized the case:

    In California, the Apollo private-equity firm paid a former CalPERS board member named Alfred Villalobos a staggering $48 million for help in securing investments from state pensions, and Villalobos delivered, helping Apollo receive $3 billion of CalPERS money. Villalobos got indicted in that affair, but only because he’d lied to Apollo about disclosing his fees to CalPERS. Otherwise, despite the fact that this is in every way basically a crude kickback scheme, there’s no law at all against a placement agent taking money from a finance firm.

    $48 million wasn’t the total Villalobos got; it was $58 million because he was pushing deals to CalPERS on behalf of four additional clients: Relational, CIM Ares, and Aurora Capital. And the part that has been curiously airbrushed out of every media account of this scandal is Villalobos was engaged in improper conduct, even if he had managed to get the needed sign-offs from CalPERS. He wasn’t a registered broker-dealer, as he was required to be when marketing deals on a regular basis.
    As we’ll explain in due course, this omission appears to be deliberate, to protect the hides of Apollo and the other fund managers (referred to in the trade as general partners or GPs) who hired a placement agent they knew, or should have known, shouldn’t be in that business at all.
    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/07/former-calpers-ceo-pleads-guilty-bribery-fraud-including-taking-cash-paper-bags.html

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)