Each business day HedgeCo.Net keeps you informed with the top hedge fund industry news, opinion and insight from around the globe. From the latest hedge fund launches, to the impact of regulation, competition, and investor activism - we track the topics and people that make a difference to you.
Macon Telegraph – In Macon, 56-year-old Gary Sheldon Hutcheson and 52-year-old Saundra McKinney Pyles are expected to enter pleas Monday on charges of defrauding more than four dozen investors out of $2.11 million.
The list of victims include well-known names in Macon’s business and professional ranks, including doctors, accountants, a retired Superior Court judge and many others.
Times Online – Accountants and lawyers who are trying to sort out the European collapse of Lehman Brothers, the American investment bank, have charged more than £100million in fees in six months.
The bonanza shows no sign of abating. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the administrator, says that costs will accrue at a similar rate over the coming months as a team of nearly 1,500 people unwinds the complex financial web behind the world’s biggest bankruptcy.
PwC paid a further £114.8 million to 800 employees of the bankrupt bank who stayed on to help to unwind millions of trades between Lehman and other banks and hedge funds.
West Palm Beach (HedgeCo.net) – President and Chairman of Hedge Funds Care (HFC), John Budzyna, will preside over the Closing Bell to mark the 11th Annual New York Open Your Heart to the Children Benefit to be held at Cipriani 42nd Street on February 11, 2009.
Hedge fund industry professionals established HFC, a charitable organisation focused on assisting young victims of abuse, in 1998. Since that time, chapters have opened in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Toronto, Cayman, and most recently in London.
The organisation comprises those companies with interests in hedge funds, including investment managers, investors, prime brokers, attorneys, accountants, administrators and information providers.
Bloomberg – When Manhattan lawyer Marc Dreier needed to apply a patina of reality to allegedly bogus promissory notes he was pitching to hedge funds, he used Mission Impossible- type tricks.
As the U.S. Attorneys Office in Manhattan tells it, he would lie his way into an accounting firm’s or real estate developer’s offices as if he had business there.
He then would use their conference rooms for meetings with hedge-fund officials to make it seem the accountants or developers were in on the deal, according to the feds.
Appropriating the accounting firm’s letterhead, he fabricated financial statements and forged audit letters, prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission allege. He would arrange conference calls between hedge-fund representatives and someone pretending to be the chief executive of Solow Realty, the developer and former Dreier client whose fake notes the feds say Dreier was trying to sell.
