Honest Corporate America? Three Equifax executives sold $2 million worth of shares days after cyber-attack became Public - by Todd Haselton

Three executives of Equifax (EFX) sold shares worth nearly $2 million in the company days after a data breach was found to affect 143 million consumers in the United States, filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission showed.

The fillings showed that the trio – Chief Financial Officer John Gamble Jr., workforce solutions president Rodolfo Ploder and U.S. information solutions president Joseph Loughran – offloaded the shares on August 1 and August 2.

Equifax said on Thursday it discovered a data breach on July 29. The credit reporting firm said the exposed data included names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, addresses and some driver's licence numbers.

The company added that 209,000 U.S. credit card numbers were obtained, in addition to "certain dispute documents with personal identifying information for approximately 182,000 U.S. consumers."

Equifax acknowledged in a statement that the three executives sold a "small percentage" of their shares, but that they "had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares."

The SEC declined to comment on the share sales.

Note EU-Digest:The SEC fillings showed that the trio – Chief Financial Officer John Gamble Jr., workforce solutions president Rodolfo Ploder and U.S. information solutions president Joseph Loughran – offloaded the shares on August 1 and August 2. 

Equifax should fire the executives and they should be prosecuted by the SEC for using "inside information" to their financial gain, regardless of what Equifax or they say.

For the complete report clck here

Banking industry: € 4.97B In Fines Against Major Banks Seems Like A Lot. Here's Why It Won't Deter Corporate Crime. - by Michael Bobelian

On April 11, 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced a record-breaking settlement with Xerox stemming from the company’s alleged accounting fraud stretching back a number of years. “Such conduct calls for stiff sanctions,” announced Paul Berger, then the commission’s Associate Director of Enforcement, “including, in this case, the imposition of the largest fine ever obtained by the SEC against a public company in a financial fraud case.”

The fine, which the SEC dubbed as “unprecedented” at the time, totaled $10 million.

The € 4.97 billion settlement announced earlier today for charges related to the manipulation of currency exchanges makes the Xerox settlement seem pedestrian by comparison. The five banks included in the deal – Citicorp, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and UBS – settled claims with various American and British enforcement bodies and all but UBS will plead guilty to criminal charges.

“The penalty all these banks will now pay is fitting considering the long-running and egregious nature of their anticompetitive conduct,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “It is commensurate with the pervasive harm done.”

The question remains whether these "outsized" penalties will actually deter corporations from further wrongdoing or do they merely represent the cost of doing business for companies with tens of billions in annual revenues.

€ 4.97B In Fines Against Major Banks Seems Like A Lot. Here's Why It Won't Deter Corporate Crime. - Forbes

Financial Community: International Lawsuits Begin to Build Momentum Against Wall Street Thugs

The Argentinian government has filed a lawsuit against Wall Street firm CitiGroup over debt repayments that Argentine officials say violate national laws, reported The Guardian.

Part of the lawsuit states that the country seeks to file criminal charges against employees of the Argentinian arm of CitiGroup. The bank said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Argentine officials had “taken certain adverse actions against Citi Argentina, including filing a lawsuit against Citi Argentina and instituting a suspension of certain activities.”

Because of this bad debt deal, the Argentine government wants not only to file charges against CitiGroup employees, but implement sanctions that bar any future operations within the country. This dispute between Argentina and CitiGroup comes during friction between the country and two other financial institutions, NML Capital and Aurelius Capital Management.

The two institutions did not accept a deal to restructure Argentina’s national debt. Argentina apparently owes a “holdout” debt of $1.3 billion to the two hedge funds, and U.S. judge Thomas Griesa ruled that it must pay that amount before receiving a restructuring deal.

Because Argentina senses a banking scam run by CitiGroup and accuses Griesa of being a banking crony, the country has ignored the judge’s ruling and blocked Citi’s capital market operations and suspended the leader of Citi’s Argentine operations, Gabriel Ribisich — who has been accused of misconduct.

The BBC recently reported that CitiGroup may plead guilty to accusations of manipulating exchange rates in foreign currency markets. Wall Street and Griesa’s cronyism have backed Argentina in a tough spot. Unrealistic expectations and international bullying pushed the country into default as Argentina is refusing to pay the hedge funds, NML and Aurelius.

Read more: International Lawsuits Begin to Build Momentum Against Wall Street Thugs

Transaction Tax: Will the CFTC, SEC Follow Europe with a Transaction Tax? - by Elan Mendel

Now that eleven euro zone countries have approved a financial transaction tax, will U.S. regulators at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) follow suit?

Ironically, though the idea of a financial transaction tax was first proposed by American economist James Tobin, the Europeans are now first to levy the FTT.

“This is a major milestone in tax history,” said Algirdas Semeta of the European Commission.
The historic adoption of the transaction tax was executed through a process called enhanced cooperation, wherein nine or more nations cooperate on legislation with the permission of an EU majority. The U.K., Luxembourg, Malta, and the Czech Republic abstained from the vote in protest.

Critics of the financial transaction tax usually point to the prospect that it will fail unless implemented on a global basis. Those taxed by the process, they argue, will likely turn to foreign markets, therefore undercutting any revenue brought in through the tax and hurting business in the process.

Yet, now that eleven major euro zone countries have adopted the tax, it remains possible that more European nations may join, giving the financial tax much needed momentum.
But will a financial transaction tax ever be adopted in the U.S.?

Read more: Will the CFTC, SEC Follow Europe with a Transaction Tax? | CFTC LAW | Forex, Futures and Derivatives Regulatory News

US Economy: America needs regulators that fight to win - by Lawrence Mitchell

The Securities and Exchange Commission blew a perfect opportunity to redefine its role with its decision last week to accept a $550m settlement with Goldman Sachs over accusations that the bank misled various investors in a subprime mortgage product at the start of the US housing crash. In its founding legislation, Congress empowered the SEC both to protect investors and to ensure a fair and efficient market. The settlement may have accomplished the first goal. But it also showed the SEC’s continuing failure to take its wider regulatory role in a more aggressive direction.

The settlement compensated the various investors for their losses, and mandated some remedial training for Goldman mortgage department employees. It also required greater internal monitoring at the bank. It caused Goldman some limited pain, in the light of its significant drop in second-quarter earnings earlier this week. Despite this, the SEC’s decision continued a previous pattern of attempting to compromise with Wall Street, one fraud at a time, in times that call for more muscular regulation and clearer public signals.
The SEC has recently seen serious calls for its merger with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission – another body now charged with regulating derivatives – or even its abolition, given the two agencies’ overlapping functions and the SEC’s failures to act over recent years. Against this background, the SEC’s Goldman suit, launched only in April, seemed to signal that the agency was back in the fight.

It was hoped that a victory against Goldman would do more than redress a fraud; it would set a wider regulatory precedent that its manner of doing business was socially and economically unacceptable. It would also have held out the possibility of beginning necessary cultural changes on Wall Street that might at least diminish the chances of future crises, while demonstrating that the SEC’s concern with market safety and fairness was more important than recouping a few bucks for big boy banks.

For more: FT.com / Comment / Opinion - America needs regulators that fight to win