SEC Madoff exhibit list now available…
Yesterday, we poked at the SEC for not just dumping 6,100 pages of material on a Friday afternoon, but for failing to provide a road-map to the 536 exhibits. In separate conversations with me, a representative of the SEC and SEC Inspector General David Kotz each suggested that it was the other’s fault for not making this information available.
Whose fault was it? Well the Inspector General’s office has just made the list of the 536 exhibits available on their site, while the SEC’s list remains uncategorized. You can see the full list here:
If only this had been made available on Friday. It would have prevented a lot of wasted hours over the weekend!
|
Posted in |
 3 Comments » |
November 4th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
The depositions are astonishing. In view of the SEC’s own formal orders to other institutions, they are even more astonishing. First, look at an SEC order from 2005. The SEC’s Office of Compliance, Inspections and Examinations (OCIE) conducted the very review that led to this order:
“…the NYSE shall establish and maintain a staff position within NYSE Regulation specifically responsible for (a) tracking and updating the status of all complaints, referrals, investigations and discipline involving all Floor Members; (b) updating and disseminating information about the status of such matters…”
OCIE also examined Madoff in 2004-2005, and read now from the Lori Richards deposition in the Madoff matter (exhibit 23, page 10). Once one of the most senior officials at the SEC, Richards was Director of OCIE (rendered below as “OC”) during its 2004-2005 examination of Madoff, which is the first time he could have been caught, according to Madoff himself:
Q: Okay. All right, let’s talk a little bit about tips and complaints, okay? Are there formal policies and procedures for handling tips and complaints in OC?
A: I don’t know. There may be, I just am not aware of them.
Q: Okay, okay. Were you aware — in the period 2003 and 2004, do you know if there were formal policies in place about tips and complaints?
A: I don’t know.
[Richards is a winner of the SEC's Distinguished Service Award, and left the SEC in 2009.]
And from the John McCarthy deposition (exhibit 29, pp 20-21). McCarthy was Associate Director of OCIE, one of its most senior positions, at the time of its 2004-2005 Madoff examination. It was his team that conducted the Madoff examination:
Q: Okay. Let’s talk about policies in OC for a minute. Were there formal policies and procedures for handling tips and complaints when you were in OC?
A: Formal policies?
Q: Yes.
A: I would have — I wouldn’t be aware of formal policies.
Q: Wouldn’t be aware?
A: Right.
Q: Why wouldn’t you be aware of them?
A: I mean there were — I don’t recall like a written policy on how to handle them.
Q: Okay. So you were not aware of any formal policies about how to handle complaints –
A: Yeah, I’m — how were you — formal like written policies in a manual or something like that, I’m not aware of those.
[A two-time winner of the SEC's Capital Markets Award, McCarthy left the SEC in 2006. he is now general counsel and head of compliance at Getco, one of the world's leading high frequency trading firms. For SEC Chair Arthur Levitt is an advisor to Getco.]
November 5th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Thanks @DoasIsay for posting this. Given the size of the dump, I’m still trying to make my way through everything, though given that it’s Q season, it’s definitely tough. I’m quite positive that based on the timing alone, there’s a treasure trove of stuff in here. While the list of exhibits helps, it still takes time to get through everything.
November 5th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Quite a few pages are missing in several of the depositions. For example, in exhibit 23 there are large gaps in the page numbers (the deposition page numbers themselves at the top of each page, not the “MADOFF_EXHIBITS-nnnn” page numbers in the footers). In this exhibit, a third or more of the pages are missing. The same is true in other depositions. Why?