The Wall Street ICEcapade

Banks, Corporate Abuses, Featured, Offshore, Scoops  

The Wall Street ICEcapade

The American Interest, July-Aug 2010 (online May 18, 2010) –

As I write this, the U.S. Senate is debating a major financial reform bill in which the credit default swap, a kind of derivative, plays a significant part. An amendment to that bill, proposed by Senators Carl Levin (D-MI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR), would ban banks from proprietary trading. There are a lot of high-rolling bankers who do not want that amendment to pass, because it will mess up their plans to repatriate foreign profits into the United States, untaxed, by trading in derivatives on their own accounts. The clearinghouse ICE Trust U.S. forms a central part of these plans.

What is ICE Trust U.S., and who owns it? ICE US Holding Co., which was established in 2008 as the parent of ICE Trust U.S., is located in the Cayman Islands. Yet none of the owners of ICE US Holding Co. are based in the Caymans. Among the owners of the Cayman‘s company are Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, which are headquartered in New York. Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Exclusive: Florida bank agency helped fraudster Stanford evade regulations to sell phony CDs

Featured, Major Past Articles, Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops  

<em>Exclusive</em>: Florida bank agency helped fraudster Stanford evade regulations to sell phony CDs

State aided suspect in huge swindle

Miami Herald, July 5, 2009 –

Winner of the Gerald Loeb award, the most important prize in financial journalism

Years before his banking empire was shut down in a massive fraud case, Allen Stanford swept into Florida with a bold plan: entice Latin Americans to pour millions into his ventures ” in secrecy.

From a bayfront office in Miami in 1998, he planned to sell investments to customers and send their money to Antigua.

But to pull it off, he needed unprecedented help from an unlikely ally: The state of Florida would have to grant him the right to move vast amounts of money offshore ” without reporting a penny to regulators. He got it.

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