Search Results for: JPMorgan

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2015 For the second time in seven months, an employee of JPMorgan Chase is alleged to have brutally murdered his wife and then taken his own life. According to Bergen County, New Jersey Prosecutor John Molinelli and police reports, 27-year old Michael A. Tabacchi and his wife, Iran Pars Tabacchi (who also went by the name Denise) were discovered dead on Friday evening, February 7, in their home in Closter, New Jersey. Their infant son was in the home and unharmed. He is under the care of the paternal grandparents. A text message from the home had been sent to the father of Michael Tabacchi asking him to come to the home, according to media reports. The father found the couple. County Prosecutor Molinelli seems to have made short work of his investigation, tweeting yesterday: “Autopsy on Closter couple shows wife died … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 13, 2015 The U.S. Justice Department has yet to summon the courage to bring a criminal courtroom trial against JPMorgan’s top executives but a serious public trial is underway nonetheless at the website www.JPMadoff.com.  Originally styled as a venue for the public to read a free chapter a month of the book, JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance Between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook, the two attorneys who created the site have now moved into their grand jury stage, presenting hard evidence in Chapter 5 on why RICO charges can, and should, be brought against top executives at JPMorgan Chase. The book’s authors and site creators are Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer. Chaitman is a nationally recognized litigator and author of The Law of Lender Liability. She is also a Bernie Madoff victim who lost a large part of her life savings to his Ponzi … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 9, 2015 JPMorgan appears incredibly adroit at ever creative means of running its reputation through the mud. Last August the Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis filed a lawsuit in Federal Court alleging that its endowment funds meant to feed and shelter homeless families and children, keep food banks stocked, and give exhausted pastors a sabbatical, ended up as a wealth transfer scheme at JPMorgan. The complaint alleges that JPMorgan engaged in “self-dealing,” made “fraudulent misrepresentations,” omitted material facts about their “widespread and profound conflicts of interests and created “toxic investment products” which resulted in “the surreptitious transfer of wealth from the Christ Church Trusts to JPMorgan.” Out of the 177 different investment products JPMorgan purchased for the Christ Church endowment, the percentage of its own proprietary products that JPMorgan purchased from itself “ranged from 68% to a staggering 85% of the portfolio” according … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: December 3, 2014 On April 29, 2010 at 7:47 in the evening, Francis Dunleavy, the head of Principal Investing within the JPMorgan Commodities Group fired off a terse email to a colleague, Rob Cauthen. The email read: “Please get him in ASAP.” The man that Dunleavy wanted to be interviewed “ASAP” was John Howard Bartholomew, a young man who had just obtained his law degree from George Washington University two years prior. But it wasn’t his law degree that Bartholomew decided to feature at the very top of the resume he sent to JPMorgan; it was the fact that while working at Southern California Edison in Power Procurement, he had “identified a flaw in the market mechanism Bid Cost Recovery that is causing the CAISO [the California grid operator] to misallocate millions of dollars.” Bartholomew goes on to brag in his resume that he had “showed how … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 17, 2014 It’s called the Dracula fraud case against JPMorgan because no matter how many times JPMorgan’s lawyers try to kill it, the case rises up from the dead to find new life. Now, with former JPMorgan insider Alayne Fleischmann revealed by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone as someone who has critical firsthand evidence that a jury needs to hear in this case, a potential $1.6 billion jury award against JPMorgan is looking winnable – if the case can ever get in front of a jury. The lawsuit was filed by affiliates of the Belgian-French bank Dexia, which received multiple bailouts by the two governments during the financial crisis. Dexia’s original complaint that was filed on January 19, 2012 in New York State Supreme Court, alleged widespread fraud in the sale of Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (RMBS) by JPMorgan, its direct affiliates and two firms it … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens: November 10, 2014 Two years after attorney Alayne Fleischmann was downsized out of her job as a Transaction Manager at JPMorgan Chase, her boss, William Buell, was hauled before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) for interrogation on just how culpable the bank was in packaging and selling toxic mortgage backed securities. Buell is the same man that Fleischmann exposed in a Rolling Stone feature article by Matt Taibbi last week as the recipient of her detailed, internal letter in early 2007, warning him that the mortgage pools her group was reviewing contained poor quality mortgage loans unfit for purchase or securitization. Despite the written warning, Fleischmann would later learn that JPMorgan, in a drive to boost market share and profits, went forward and purchased the pool, securitized many of the loans, then sold them to unsuspecting investors. But when Buell was asked directly during his questioning … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 5, 2014 On January 6 of this year, JPMorgan Chase entered into a two-year probation agreement known as a “deferred prosecution” agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. The deal allowed JPMorgan to avoid prosecution for two felony counts related to its failures in serving as Bernard Madoff’s bank as tens of billions of dollars were laundered between accounts while it made none of the required suspicious activity reports – except one to the United Kingdom. The deferred prosecution agreement, signed on January 6, 2014, required that for the next two years, JPMorgan had to bring to the attention of Federal prosecutors any knowledge of wrongdoing inside the bank, cooperate fully and in good faith, and agree to “commit no crimes under the federal laws of the United States subsequent to the execution of this agreement…” If JPMorgan broke its end of the bargain, … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 3, 2014 The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., which functions as the central bank of the United States, has farmed out much of its Quantitative Easing (QE) programs to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York since the financial crisis of 2008. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has, in turn, contractually farmed out a hefty chunk of the logistics of that work to JPMorgan Chase in the last six years. Sitting quietly on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s web site is a vendor agreement and other documents indicating that JPMorgan Chase holds all of the Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) that the New York Fed has purchased under its various Quantitative Easing programs. As of last Wednesday, that figure was $1.7 trillion dollars. (The New York Fed has confirmed that JPMorgan is custodian for these assets.) In … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 22, 2014  Yesterday the Inspector General of the Federal Reserve System released a highly abbreviated report on the New York Fed’s supervision of JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office (CIO) that spawned the $6.2 billion in exotic derivative losses in 2012 – using hundreds of billions of dollars in FDIC insured deposits to make those wild bets. The debacle became known as the London Whale since the outsized trades were conducted in London. The four page summary report that was sanitized for the public includes two bombshells for those who took the time to read the report carefully. First, the Inspector General specifically notes that “we selected July 2004 through April 2012 as the time period for our evaluation. July 2004 marked JPMC’s merger with Bank One Corporation (Bank One), and JPMC created the CIO in 2005.” What is the relevance of that nugget? We … Continue reading →

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: September 10, 2014 Sparks were flying yesterday in what is typically a snooze-worthy Senate session. It felt like alien body snatchers had decided to remove the zombies and return the real U.S. Senators to their chairs on the Senate Banking Committee. Senators, right and left, asked tough, probing questions of the nation’s banking regulators, leaving many squirming in their chairs. The session was so unusual that Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, closed out the session in complete agreement that there is something seriously broken about the justice system in America. Senator Warren told the hearing that in the past year, three of the nation’s largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America — have admitted breaking the law and settled the claims for $35 billion. The Senator continued: “As Judge Rakoff of … Continue reading →