Two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times reported, in a very astonished tone, that Steven Cohen, who was once a Wall Street hedge fund powerhouse owning the multi-billion dollar SAC Capital, is about to return to offering investors the chance to place their cash with him as he launches a new hedge fund. The return of Steven Cohen to the world of hedge fund managers is astonishing. According to the newspapers, it highlights the impunity that is enjoyed by Wall Street titans.
At the start of 2016, Steven Cohen’s SAC Capital was forced to close down under an agreement that Cohen signed with United States government prosecutors. That deal also barred him for two years from opening a fund that could manage the cash of outside investors. Two years earlier, he had paid a record fine of $1.8 billion to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. This was based on a finding that SAC “trafficked in inside information on a scale without any known precedent.”
As well reported by the media, while eight of Cohen’s former employees at SAC Capital were prosecuted for insider-trading, Cohen was never personally charged. He was never even forced to appear in court. The United States government, for all its presumed might and range of enforcement tools, also could not stop him investing his own cash, said to have amounted to $10 billion. So Cohen created a private trading company called Point 72. It is this firm which he is now about to open to investors.
The Steven Cohen story highlights a fundamental fact of life for those who sit at the top of Wall Street finance: It may be wrong, but it is not illegal. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and prosecutors for the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, devoted seven years to investigating SAC Capital. They prosecuted top SAC Capital traders. Their legal fees were helpfully paid for by SAC. Can anyone be surprised that they refused to provide evidence to be used against Cohen?
According to Wall Street Journal report, on the very day that one of those traders was starting a nine-year prison term, Cohen was at Christie’s auction house. He successfully bid for a Giacometti sculpture at a record price of $141.3 million. It was as if he was brazenly demonstrating that despite all of the government’s efforts, life for him was just lavishly splendid.
The reemergence of Steven Cohen highlights a fundamental truth about what many people perceive as corruption across much of the top echelon of American finance. American financial system insiders stressed that over many years the leaders of many of the most powerful Wall Street institutions, assisted by the nation’s highest paid lawyers, have avoided being prosecuted for activities that are unethical.
SheelahKolhatkar has written an outstanding book, “Black Edge,” about the many efforts made to bring Steven Cohen to justice. In the epilogue to the book she wrote: “The financial industry has evolved to be so complex that large parts of it are almost completely beyond the reach of regulators and law enforcement.” She added, “Wall Street’s most successful enterprises are constantly pushing into the frontier; every time the law looks like it’s catching up, they move further away.”
Transparency International recently reported that it is remarkable that the largest banks in Europe and the United States have paid over $340 billion in fines in the last eight years for all manner of corrupt activities. Yet, not a single chief executive or chairman of one of these banks has ever been personally prosecuted. For example, one of those banks is Goldman Sachs. It has paid fines for all manner of alleged crimes over the years, including alleged fraud related to sub-prime mortgage securities.
According to Financial Times, for many years, SAC Capital traded hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of United States shares using Goldman Sachs as its broker. It continued to act for SAC Capital even after the New York United States Attorney’s publicly blasted SAC Capital for insider-trading. At the time, Gary Cohn, then Goldman Sachs’s President, justified the continuing relationship with SAC by stating: “They’re an important client to us.” Mr. Cohn left Goldman Sachs a year ago with a personal fortune of over $300 million, to become President Trump’s chief economic policy advisor.
Is it any wonder then that Steven Cohn, as well as a former Goldman Sachs partner, Steven Mnuchin, now the United States Treasury Secretary, are the chief architects not only of the recent tax cuts that provide vast benefits for financial institutions, but also of efforts to rewrite the laws and regulations that curb some of the activities of major banks?
Top Wall Street executives have frequently held leading United States administration positions. Steven Mnuchin is the third United States Treasury Secretary to come from Goldman Sachs in recent times, Henry Paulson served in the post in the George W. Bush administration, while Robert Rubin occupied the office in the Clinton administration.
Transparency International top official stated that far from innocuous or, as they like to claim to serve the public interest, they are the principal enforcers of Wall Street rule over the broader interests of the American people. Behind the very thin veneer of “public service,” they shape the ways in which banks and financial firms are regulated in the United States. Hedge fund bosses have long enjoyed special tax benefits and Congress, despite some major efforts, has never been able to change this.
Anti-corruption watchdogs lamented that another real-world problem is that government prosecutors are just too close to Wall Street. How else can one interpret the fact that a number of the lead government investigators and prosecutors who pursued Steven Cohen now have lucrative positions at leading Wall Street law firms that participated in the defense of SAC? According to them, the main reason why public prosecutors never got Steven Cohen, or tried to get Gary Cohn and other top Wall Street bankers, was that they could never find hard evidence, with the signatures of these people, that would convince a court jury of their guilt. They could never find a “smoking gun.”
As one new case after another is brought against these mighty financial institutions, the constant argument of the top executives is that errors were pursued by rogue employees. The lower level traders at the big banks and funds may go to jail, while the top brass continues to enjoy fine champagne. The record, underscored by Steven Cohen’s return, shows that it is incredibly difficult to pursue large-scale and complex cases of financial malfeasance in the United States. This is one more reason why the United States is so attractive to many of the world’s kleptocrats and leaders of organized crime as a place to invest their ill-gotten gains via secretive offshore financial havens of course.
America and Kleptocrats
Investec Cape Town Art Fair on this weekend
The Cape Town Art Fair – which has been re-named as The Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF) – is on from Friday, February 16 to Sunday February 18 between 11am and 7pm in the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
There is an entrance fee but once you are in, you are in: walkabouts, talks and performance art works are included with the ticket at no further charge. An exciting innovation this year is a new event: Harboured – in the Silo District, at V&A Waterfront. Films “exploring mythologies, ideologies and histories between safe and unsafe harbours” will be screened in shipping containers in the Silo precinct. There is no charge to attend.
Harboured is part of the The After Hours Hub – a platform of satellite events which are part of ICTAF but taking place off-site from the CTCC.
Harboured is also the headline attraction of the After Hours Hub and starts on the Wednesday before the fair (February 14 at 8pm). This is an art-inspired Valentine’s Day date night. Harboured runs every day until the end of ICTAF on February 18, from 4pm-11pm.
Curator of Harboured is Brent Meistre. An artist and curator, he heads up Analogue Eye – a not-for-profit project which screens video art works in public spaces.
Meistre explained how Harboured will roll out: “There are a 13 works by 11 artists from South Africa and Italy.
“There are three containers and a range of works in each container. The short film format works will each have their own containers and the shorter length works will be screened consecutively in their own containers.
“The public are encouraged to move from one container to another, where different types of works may be engaged with. The Analogue Eye project is focused on getting filmic works into public spaces where the viewers not only engage the works but also each other.”
Nontobeko Ntombela has been appointed as the curator of the inaugural iteration of Solo, working alongside Fair Curator Tumelo Mosaka and the ICTAF team. Solo will focus on the production of women artists, offering different perspectives of the widespread socio-political issues faced by women in both public and private spheres, while also highlighting their contribution to the art world.
Artists who will be showcased in the section are Maïmouna Guerresi (Senegal/Italy) represented by Officine dell’Immagine (Milan, Italy); Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (Botswana) represented by Tiwani Contemporary (London, United Kingdom); Stacey Gillian Abe (Uganda) represented by Afriart Gallery (Kampala, Uganda); Parul Thacker (India) represented by Amar Gallery (London, United Kingdom); Keyezua (Angola) represented by MOV’ART (Luanda, Angola); Lhola Amira (South Africa) represented by SMAC (Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa); Lucinda Mudge (South Africa) represented by Everard Read Circa Gallery (Cape Town, Johannesburg and Franschhoek, South Africa, London UK); Kimathi ct tottMafafo (South Africa) represented by Ebony/Curated (Cape Town, South Africa); Ingrid Bolton (South Africa) represented by Berman Contemporary (Johannesburg, South Africa); and Buhlebezwe Siwani (South Africa) represented by WHATIFTHEWORLD (Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa).
(IOL)
Kenyatta’s grand plan to silence Kenya’s free press
Since coming to power, Kenyatta has tried to control the media through co-optation or force. The shut down of TV stations is his latest move.
In a move that has exposed Kenya’s fragile democracy, the government recently shut down the country’s three biggest TV stations.
This unprecedented, unlawful and panicked response was supposed to ensure that there was no live coverage of the mock swearing in of the National Super Alliance (NASA) opposition leader Raila Odinga as the “People’s President”. The government outlawed the 30 January event and threatened to charge Odinga with treason.
NASA has refused to recognise Uhuru Kenyatta as Kenya’s legitimate president after he won the repeat presidential election last October. The re-run was held after the Supreme Court annulled the first poll in August. NASA insists it won the August election and boycotted the second poll.
The media shutdown has been condemned by rights groups, politicians, the public and international actors. Not since former President Daniel Arap Moi’s tyrannical rule has a government been so brazen in its disregard for rule of law.
However, while especially alarming, Kenyatta’s latest actions did not come out of nowhere. They are the culmination of a long-running and vindictive campaign against the media that began when he first came to power.
Centralising power
Kenyatta’s clampdown was not entirely unexpected. Since becoming president in 2013, his consolidation of political power has been ruthless. He has established a political system in which there is no clear distinction between the ruling Jubilee Party and the state. The police have been militarised and alternative centres of political power, both within the government and in the opposition, are being dismantled.
Like his father Jomo in the 1970s and Moi in the 1980s, Kenyatta is slowly embodying the image of a dictator through a combination of co-opting Kenya’s wealthy economic and political class, and brute force.
Having won the 2013 elections in a controversial victory made possible through the support of a number of smaller political parties, Kenyatta later insisted on their dissolution and the formation of one umbrella party in Jubilee. He then became the party leader. Where he previously had to navigate the interests of various parties to implement his agenda, he can now make unilateral decisions with minimum opposition.
Kenyatta’s media strategy
In his attempts to consolidate his power, Kenyatta has also targeted the press. Kenya boasts a relatively robust media with over 60 TV stations, more than 130 radio stations, and several newspaper titles. But the industry is dominated by three big players: the Nation Media Group, Standard Group, and Royal Media Services. They own NTV, KTN and Citizen, respectively – the three TV stations recently shut down.
At the same time, Kenyatta has invested massively in Mediamax, his family’s media company which owns several radio stations, a television station and a national newspaper.
He has also attempted to co-opt sections of the mainstream media. Soon after his inauguration in 2013, he invited some of the country’s top editors and journalists to State House for a “breakfast meeting”. This, he said, was to open a new chapter in “press-state” relations. The much criticised invitation was quickly repaid with sympathetic and sycophantic media coverage of the government. A few high-level journalists were offered plum state jobs.
However, some sections of the press refused to play ball and the public turned against what was gradually becoming a pliant media. Soon after that, the honeymoon ended and the media clampdown began in earnest. Just one year after becoming president, editors and media managers started getting routine summons to State House. Kenyatta even had the gumption to warn journalists on World Freedom Day in 2014 that they did not have absolute freedom on what to publish or broadcast.
Last April, the government decided to stop advertising in local commercial media. State departments and agencies were directed to advertise in the government newspaper and online portal My.Gov. While it claimed this was to curb runaway spending, it was clear the decision was aimed at starving the mainstream media of advertising revenue. This move came not long after Denis Galava, a top Kenyan journalist and editor at the Nation Media Group, was sacked for writing a scathing editorial about the President.
More recently, the deputy president’s spokesperson threatened a journalist with firing following a news report that claimed the president and his deputy had disagreed over cabinet appointments. Meanwhile, just days before Odinga’s “swearing in”, Linus Kaikai, chairman of the Kenya Editors Guild, claimed that a number of editors and media managers had been summoned to State House and given a dressing down by the president, threatening to revoke the licences of those who broadcast the event live.
Kaikai and fellow Nation journalists Larry Madowo and Ken Mujungu have since been threatened with arrest. They had to go to court to obtain anticipatory bail to bar police from arresting them.
Ominous signs
With both houses of Parliament dominated by the ruling Jubilee Party, civil society weakened, and opposition leaders lacking the capacity to meaningfully confront the government, Kenya’s mainstream media remains a rare bulwark against the country’s descent to authoritarianism.
But there are increasingly ominous signs that Kenyatta is on a mission to silence the press as he consolidates his power. These latest events and government’s brazen decision to disobey the court order directing it to end the media shutdown only further shows its disdain for the law and press freedoms.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
BY GEORGE OGOLA
Second historical Ras Abebe Aregay home demolished
A second historical home belonging to Ras Abebe Aregay was demolished only weeks after Muller Real Estate destroyed one of his other homes. The home was 2,000sqm and, like the first one, was located in Adwa square near Aware. It was seventy years old. This means that only one of the three homes listed as historical sites by the Addis Ababa Cultural and Tourism Bureau remain.
The excavator tore down the historical heritage last Friday at 8pm by the owner of the home, a church who wanted to replace it with a G+14 story building. Eye witness told Capital the entire process took 30 minutes.
“The excavator came at night and demolished the old house with no pity in their heart,” one person said.
Konjit, the wife of Ras Abebe lived in the home. It was later sold to a businessperson and then to the church for 1.2 million birr 20 years ago.
Recently Capital reported that the Addis Ababa Cultural and Tourism Bureau planned to file charges against Muller Real Estate for demolishing the first historical Ras Abebe Aregay home.
It was listed as one of the 440 historical houses in the City’s master plan. It sits on 1,800sqm and was constructed 70 years ago, and was used as a residence for Ras Abebe Aregay and his families.
Under the current heritage proclamation in Ethiopia if somebody illegally demolishes a heritage site they may face up to 10 years imprisonment plus a fine.
Ras Abebe Aregay was a major leader of the resistance in Shewa against the Italians during the fascist occupation, and leader of the largest anti-occupation force in Ethiopia. Abebe Aregay was the grandchild of Menelik II’s loyal General Ras Gobena Dachi. As Balambaras Abebe Aregay, he had been commander of Addis Ababa’s metropolitan police before the 1936 occupation of the capital. After the Emperor’s departure and the Italian occupation, the then Balambaras Abebe Aregay was proclaimed a son of Lij Iyasu at Amba Aradam as Emperor Meleke Tsehai in 1938, and was given the title of Ras. However the young claimant died of an illness soon after, and Abebe Aregay returned to supporting the restoration of Emperor Haile Selassie. Emperor Haile Selassie again granted him the title of Ras legitimately, and he was among the guerilla leaders that escorted the Emperor back into Addis Ababa on Liberation Day, May 5, 1941. Ras Abebe served as governor general of Shewa, governor general of Tigrai, Minister of Defense, Minister of the Interior, Crown Councilor and Senator at various times. He was killed during the Imperial Guard coup attempt of 1960 and was buried at Debre Libanos Monastery.
