UBS Is Enron

[McCamy Taylor]

Learn the name UBS . This company does not just act like Enron. It really is Enron. For one thing, as I will show, UBS Warburg bought the main money making operation of Enron, the Energy Trading Unit that Ken Lay used to price gouge California. And it bought Enron's senator, Phil "Nation of Whiners" Gramm the on again off again on again John McCain financial adviser----though he was an ex-senator by the time UBS acquired him. About the only difference is this round of scandals involves the banking/mortgage industry rather than energy price fixing. All the other ingredients are here. Investors have been defrauded. Insiders have dumped their own securities as prices have fallen. And Republican lawmakers in the administration are engaged in a cover up.

Today, UBS is back in the headlines, because NY state has filed a $37 billion lawsuit on behalf of defrauded investors. This, despite the Bush administration’s vendetta against Eliot Spitzer which was probably designed to discourage states from seeking to punish bank fraud where the feds refused to do so.

I. With So Many Enrons Just Waiting to Happen, Former Senator Phil Gramm Would Not Be Out of Work Long

In 2002, just months after leaving the U.S. Senate in disgrace over the roles which he and his wife played in helping Enron construct its house of cards ( for details and links see my recent journal McCain Economic Adviser Phil "Nation of Whiners" Gramm and Wife Wendy Brought Us Enron

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/258 )

Phil Gramm was hired by USB Warburg.

http://www.ubs.com/1/e/media_overview/media_americas/search1/search10?newsId=58925

October 7, 2002
Senator Phil Gramm to join UBS Warburg
UBS Warburg today announced that Texas Senator Phil Gramm will join the firm as vice chairman. In this role, he will advise clients on corporate finance issues and strategy. Senator Gramm plans to join the firm at the end of his term. In his new role, he will work closely with Vice Chairmen Lord Brittan and Ken Costa, who are based in London.

Senator Gramm is retiring after serving 24 years in Congress, including the last 18 years as Senator from Texas.

„Senator Gramm’s experience gained from more than 35 years in academia and government make him uniquely suited to assist our clients to meet the challenges presented by today’s business environment,” said John P. Costas, chairman and chief executive officer of UBS Warburg.

„I am delighted to enter the next phase of my career as an investment banker at UBS Warburg,” said Senator Gramm. „Having spent my professional life working on finance related issues, I look forward to bringing that experience and knowledge to bear on behalf of UBS Warburg clients worldwide.”

II. UBS Is Enron

This employment opportunity did not come out of nowhere. USB Warburg had already bought Enron's Energy Trading Unit in early 2002, making USB the new Enron---literally---since energy trading was Enron's main source of income.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E2D61F39F931A25752C0A9649C8B63

The Enron Corporation announced yesterday that UBS Warburg had won the bidding for its energy-trading business, which was the crown jewel of Enron and was responsible for about 90 percent of its revenue.

snip

''UBS Warburg is excited by the prospect of re-establishing this technology-based trading business,'' John P. Costas, chief executive of UBS Warburg, said in a statement. ''It will be a valuable extension of our worldwide trading activities.''

The New York Times makes it sound like happy days are here again, but read this blog entry from a different source.

http://www.johnmugarian.com/2006/05/ubs_enron_and_former_senator_p.html

While former US Senator Phil Gramm's wife, Wendy Gramm was a member of Enron's audit committee, and also serving on the company's of the Board of Directors, UBS was a consultant for the State of California in 2002 to help fix the State's energy crisis.

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights (FTCR) wanted Governor Gray Davis to fire UBS, saying the company had a conflict of interest since they represented both the State of California and Enron.- Read Article

Senator Gramm defended Enron, and basically told California that the state's energy problems were of their own making.

Shortly after, Enron went bankrupt, and Gramm resigned taking a job with UBS Warburg as a Vice President.

After Enron went bankrupt, UBS Warburg bought Enron's energy trading operations. UBS PaineWebber which is a subsidiary of UBS Warburg, was in charge of Enron's employee stock option program.

In Houston, a former UBS PaineWebber broker, Chung Wu was fired after he advised his clients to sell their Enron stock when it was trading around $36.- Read Article

And here is the link about the broker that UBS fired in August 2001 at the urging of Enron, because he advised employees of Enron who owned stock in their company to sell when shares were at $36. You read that correctly. UBS helped Enron to trick Enron employees into holding onto worthless shares in the company, in order to inflate the company's value, even as Enron executives and friends within the Bush administration were dumping their stock.

Enron (news/quote) executives pressed UBS PaineWebber to take action against a broker who advised some Enron employees to sell their shares in August and was fired by the brokerage firm within hours of the complaint, according to e-mail messages released today by Congressional investigators.

The broker, Chung Wu, of PaineWebber's Houston office, sent a message to clients early on Aug. 21 warning that Enron's "financial situation is deteriorating" and that they should "take some money off the table."

That afternoon, an Enron executive in charge of its stock option program sent a stern message to PaineWebber executives, including the Houston branch office manager. "Please handle this situation," the newly released message stated. "This is extremely disturbing to me."

PaineWebber fired Mr. Wu less than three hours later.

http://bodurtha.georgetown.edu/enron/The%20Man%20Who%20Paid%20the%20Price%20for%20Sizing%20Up%20Enron.htm

And here is an excellent document that has much, much more on the many ties between UBS-PaineWebber and Enron, including the many Enron assets and executives which EBS obtained, the investigations of UBS related to the Enron scandal and its eventual settlement with the government.

http://www.lawyershop.com/practice-areas/criminal-law/white-collar-crimes/securities-fraud/lawsuits/ubs-warbug/

UBS Warburg purchased Enron’s energy trading unit in January of 2002, after the company filed for bankruptcy. The operations were renamed UBS Warburg Energy. In addition to obtaining the business, UBS Warburg acquired two Enron skyscrapers and took aboard 650 former Enron employees, including executives John Lavorato and Louise Kitchen, who had taken the company’s largest bonuses after the bankruptcy ($5 million and $2 million), and Greg Whalley, Enron’s former president.

snip

UBS Warburg faced two additional allegations between the time it fired Wu and settled with federal regulating agencies. In August of 2002, a class action lawsuit was filed against UBS Warburg for its failure to drop its “strong buy” rating of Enron until four days before it filed for bankruptcy. The complaint alleged that UBS Warburg violated Sections 10(b)(5), 11, and 12 the Securities Exchange Act.

For all practical purposes, UBS was and is Enron.

Here is the settlement.

On December 20, 2002 the SEC released information on the $1.4 billion settlement that had been reached between numerous regulating agencies (Securities Exchange Comission , New York Attorney General, National Association of Securities Dealers , North American Securities Administrators Association , and New York Stock Exchange ), and ten prominent investment banking firms that had been under investigation. The settlement was finalized on April 28, 2003.The terms of the settlement focused on each firm’s need to:

* Keep the research and ratings of analysts separate from the influence of investment banking
* Cease the practice of “spinning” IPOs
* Contract research from at least three independent firms
* Make its ratings and recommendations publicly available
* Pay a monetary settlement

As part of the settlement, UBS Warburg agreed to pay $25 million as a penalty, $25 in “disgorgement,” $25 million to fund independent research, and $5 million for future investor education.

UBS Warburg continues to face allegations regarding its analyst advice and actions in connection with Enron.

Somehow, I do not think that this hand slap taught UBS anything except that corporate fraud can be very, very profitable.

III. UBS Warburg Clients Should Have Paid Attention to What Happened to Enron Investors

Today, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced a massive lawsuit against the Swiss giant on behalf of 50,000 investors whom he claims have been swindled out of $20 billion.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/24/AR2008072403740.html?hpid=sec-business

The suit alleges that UBS defrauded more than 50,000 customers out of more than $20 billion by knowingly misrepresenting the investments, which are known as auction-rate securities, while several senior bank executives were selling off more than $21 million of their personal holdings in these bonds.

"Not only is UBS guilty of committing a flagrant breach of trust between the bank and its customers, its top executives jumped ship as soon as the securities market started to collapse, leaving thousands of customers holding the bag," Cuomo said in a statement.

Apparently the executives at UBS left an email trail a mile wide, when they began to dump their ARSs, while failing to notify their investors that their own ARSs were going down the toilet. Now, where did that happen before? Ah, that's right! At Enron!

For people like me whose academic specialty is not business, here is a wiki link about Auction Rate Securities. Basically, these were an investment option for the rich and for corporations (minimum buy in $25,000) that promised greater return on investment) which were sold to investors as being risk free because the bank promised that it would step in to guarantee a certain minimum price at auction if no one else wanted to bid on these pieces of paper. Well, surprise, surprise, in February of this year, USB, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch decided that they would not hold up their part of the bargain, no one bid on the ARSs, 80% of them had no bidders, the market failed, values of the ARSs fell----and USB still will not buy up its ARS at the new lower prices, leaving its very rich and powerful investors steaming mad. No wonder so many state attorney generals are taking action where the federal government refuses to do anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_rate_security

As if this is not bad enough, the executives of the company have been caught in an insider trading scandal. No, not a Martha Stewart pretend insider trading scandal. This is the real thing. From the WaPo link above.

In one instance, the suit says, UBS's chief risk officer sent an e-mail to the firm's chief executive, who copied another executive, outlining "potential trouble" with the securities, dangers posed by the company's growing inventory of them and the potential damage to the firm's reputation if it didn't fulfill its obligations to investors.

According to the complaint, that second executive, dubbed "Executive A," then forwarded the e-mail to two other senior managers and, just 10 minutes later, wrote another e-mail to his personal financial adviser, stating, "I want to get out of arcs. Let's talk on Monday."

Another UBS executive acted similarly, unloading more than $6 million of his securities after learning of their problems, as did other company officials, according to the complaint. In all, the suit alleges that UBS officials sold more than $21 million in auction-rate securities from November 2007 to Feb. 12.

The suit does not name the executives. We all want to know if Phil Gramm's name is in that lawsuit. And also, did his wife have any of those ARSs and did she sell any of them? And what about the McCains?

IV. How Much of the Blame Rests on Gramm’s Shoulders and How Much Will Stick to Him and McCain?

Even before this lawsuit, people were putting two and two together and coming up with Enron Redux. Here are some of the reviews of UBS’s spectacular fall from grace.

This article from June claims that Phil Gramm’s job was to lobby Congress to keep UBS afloat----which was what Ken Lay paid him to do for Enron when he was a Senator. And it is a PR nightmare for Gramm and McCain because it ties the UBS scandal to Enron and to the GOP presidential candidate and his financial adviser.

http://www.americablog.com/2008/06/phil-gramms-ubs-has-new-problems.html

After showing initially profitable results, the banking world has since reminded some of why we had particular banking laws in place since the Great Depression. Gramm ignored history and thought he knew better. As the credit crisis grew Gramm, a Washington insider, was tasked with lobbying Congress to ease the pain of the problem he helped create.

The latest scandal to involve the McCain campaign co-chair lobbyist are investigations into UBS by the SEC as well as regulators from Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Is there a "20 strikes and you're out" policy in the McCain team? If you thought ties to Halliburton and Big Oil were bad with Bush, that's nothing compared to Wall Street problems and McCain.

UBS Financial Services Inc. knew as early as December that a segment of the municipal bond business was in trouble, but the Wall Street firm kept selling the investments to some clients without warning them of the risk, according to documents reviewed by the Globe.

In July, the story was still gaining momentum. When investors have lost billions, they tend to make their voices heard.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/145011/page/2

Critics have charged that Gramm's action as a senator helped lay the groundwork for some of the problems in the housing and oil markets. But it's hard to pin any of the UBS debacles on the former Texas senator. At UBS, Gramm held the post of vice chairman, a position Michelle Leder dubbed in Slate "the greatest job in business" for its combination of high status and low work rate. Gramm was a lobbyist and adviser, not an operating executive. And he had nothing to do with the forces that impelled banks and banking executives into foolish behavior in recent years; cheap money, greed and a bubble mentality are far bigger than Gramm. But UBS's continuing travails should lead us to wonder how effective Gramm is as an elder statesman. As an adviser, an economist, an expert in the ways of Washington and in the American financial system, part of Gramm's job surely was to advise the bank how to stay out of investment and regulatory trouble. Oops!

And then there is this piece which basically lays out the charges for a criminal indictment of UBS---and its agent Phil Gramm

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/07/10/ubs-exec-and-mccain-advisor-phil-gramm-u-s-is-nation-of-whine/

Gramm's UBS is a leader on three important fronts in the effort to destroy the U.S. economy: the $1.3 trillion subprime mortgage catastrophe, the $330 billion Auction Rate Securities (ARS) freeze, and a tax evasion scheme of unknown magnitude.
snip
• Subprime. Politico.com reports that Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006 and received a portion of $750,000 in lobbying fees for his efforts that set the stage for the subprime mortgage catastrophe which cost UBS $32 billion in subprime losses alone.
• ARS.Slate.com reports that Massachusetts accused UBS of selling retail brokerage customers ARSs -- about which I posted -- that made money for UBS's investment banking unit but caused the retail customers to suffer significant losses.
• Tax evasion. Slate.com also reports that UBS's asset management business is the subject of an ongoing federal investigation, in which Bradley Birkenfeld, an American UBS private banker who was arrested on tax evasion charges, has plead guilty and is cooperating with the government. Birkenfeld helped a client bring diamonds into the U.S. by shoving them in a tube of toothpaste.

V. I Meant It When I Wrote That UBS Is Enron (Minus Ken Lay)

UBS enabled Enron to pass itself off as a solvent company to investors for several months after it was clear that it was on the verge of bankruptcy. This cost many their life's savings. UBS paid nothing for its crimes. UBS them absorbed Enron---and its senator, Phil Gramm---and began to exploit the Enron loophole that had allowed Enron to make so much paper profit. This produced the exact same results---eventual financial loss for the company and customers, executives who avoided loss through insider trading and misrepresentation to their clients. All of this was made possible by Phil Gramm, who successfully lobbied to get even more privileges for business to allow them to steal even more from investors---even though everyone knew his history and the history of his company when it came to investor fraud.

UBS is Enron. Phil Gramm is a serial enabler of corporate fraud on a massive scale who can not be allowed to direct economic policy in this country. Because if he could get Congress to do what it did for UBS when he was a private lobbyist, imagine what he could accomplish if he had a job in someone's cabinet, making administrative decisions.

[Pale Blue Dot]

1. k & r nt

[geckosfeet]

2. Great great info. Thanks. k&r and

:hug:

[kenny blankenship]

3. It is the duty of all loyal Communists to root for McCain

because if he gets in the White House and brings psychopaths like Phil Gramm along as econ advisers, the doom of capitalism is signed, sealed, and delivered.

It's worse than UBS=Enron. USA = Enron. The next President whoever that is, inherits an rickety, insolvent house of cards. Phil Gramm is just the man to bring it down.

[El Supremo]

4. How come your links act oddly?

When they open in a new tab, I can't get back to the old tab without closing the new one.

There is no URL that shows up in the URL address box, but there is one at the bottom for the mouse.

Good research though. I'm sending it to my UBS Financial Services Broker.

[seemslikeadream]

5. ***It's the Phil and Wendy Show***

look what I found on the google


http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php%3Faz%3Dview_all%26address%3D389x3348975&h=216&w=400&sz=32&hl=en&start=9&tbnid=-7VzlfHIUgYq7M:&tbnh=67&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dwendy%2Bgramm%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG

[robinlynne]

6. I am wowed by your OP!

[seemslikeadream]

7. (Minus Ken Lay)

Are ya sure about that one?



:tinfoilhat: ;)

[mojowork_n]

8. I'm sorry, I had to look up the acronym.

UBS stands for "Union Bank of Switzerland."

This is cut and pasted from the bottom of their Wiki page, the "controversies" section:

That full name brought back some news stories I'd read, and the part about the FBI
wanting to investigate them for their part in estimated $100 Billion Dollar annual
tax evasion losses from the Treasury is interesting, too:

In January 1997, Christoph Meili, a night watchman at the Union Bank of Switzerland (as UBS was then known), found the bank historian destroying archives compiled by a subsidiary that had extensive dealings with Nazi Germany, in direct violation of a recent Swiss law (adopted on December 13, 1996) protecting such material. UBS acknowledged that it had "made a deplorable mistake", but maintained that the destroyed archives were unrelated to the Holocaust. Meili was suspended from his job at the security company that served UBS, following a criminal investigation into whether his whistleblowing had violated bank secrecy laws.<11>

In 2001, UBS was blamed for refusing to extend Swissair's line of credit, forcing a grounding of Swissair's planes on October 2, 2001. UBS Chairman Marcel Ospel was blamed by many for ostensibly evading the request for an extension of Swissair's line of credit, and the day after the grounding, thousands of demonstrators marching in front of the Swissair headquarters carried a banner reading "Bin Ospel" (comparing him to Osama bin Laden because of the effect of his actions on airlines' business).<12>

In April 2002, Bank of America sued five people who left its asset- and mortgage-backed securities groups for UBS, alleging that the five conspired to steal trade secrets, proprietary software and clients from Bank of America. Bank of America filed a lawsuit for US$ 20 million against Shahid Quraishi, Peter Faigl, Paul Scialabba, Reggie DeVilliers and Daniel Huang, who had previously worked for their asset-backed group based in Charlotte.<13>

On March 20, 2003 UBS client, HealthSouth and its founder/CEO Richard M. Scrushy were accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of an accounting scandal where the company's earnings were falsely inflated by $1.4 billion. In 1996, Scrushy allegedly instructed the company's senior officers and accountants to falsify company earnings reports in order to meet investor expectations and control the price of the company's stock. In certain fiscal years, the company's income was overstated by as much as 4700 percent. The $1.4 billion represents more than 10 percent of the company's total assets. Three senior bankers at UBS Howard Capek, Benjamin Lorello and William McGahan, all whom had extremely close relationships with HealthSouth's management, all testified for congressional hearings, but none was convicted of any wrongdoing. McGahan, who was in jeopardy of losing his employment with the firm at the height of the scandal <14>, later resigned on April 10, 2004 for personal reasons not related to the scandal. <15>

On May 10, 2004 UBS was fined $100 million by the U.S.Federal Reserve for illegally transferring funds from an account set up by the Federal Reserve at UBS to Iran, Cuba and other countries presently under a U.S. trade embargo. <16>

In April 2005, UBS lost the high profile case Zubulake v. UBS Warburg, a discrimination and retaliation suit. The plaintiff Laura Zubulake, a former institutional equities saleswoman at the company's Stamford office, alleged her manager, Matthew Chapin, had undermined and removed her from professional responsibilities, excluded her from business outings, belittled her to colleagues and generally treated her different from the men on her desk. Also, she alleged that there were several sexist policies in place, such as entertaining clients at strip clubs, that made it difficult for women to foster business contacts with clients.<17> An important event in the case was that UBS had not preserved relevant e-mails after the litigation hold had been in place. Because of this, federal judge Shira Scheindlin gave the jury a final "adverse inference" instruction, in part stating, "The fact that some UBS employees failed to preserve their e-mails after being instructed to do so, and that such e-mails cannot now be produced, is sufficient circumstantial evidence from which you are permitted, but not required, to conclude that the missing evidence was unfavorable to UBS.". The jury found in favor of Zubulake on both claims and awarded $9.1 million in compensatory damages (including back pay and professional damage), and $20.2 million in punitive damages. The case was seen as a landmark in the realms of e-discovery, document retention, computer forensics, and human resources.<18> <19>
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) alleged that UBS had played a role in the 2004 Black Monday stock market crash which followed the National Democratic Alliance government’s defeat in the general elections. SEBI's ruling of May 17, 2005 barred UBS from issuing or renewing participatory notes for a period of one year.The ban was later lifted on appeal, as a result of a government tribunal ruling on September 9, 2005.

On October 18, 2005, three African-American employees filed a class action lawsuit against the company in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York alleging racial discrimination in hiring, promotion and other employment practices. The three plaintiffs in Freddie H. Cook, Sylvester L. Flaming Jr. and Timothy J. Gandy v. UBS Financial Services, Inc., claim that segregation and discrimination in job assignments and compensation were widespread and the firm had done nothing to diversify its workforce. The lawsuit also claims offices operating in Largo, Maryland and Flushing, New York were illegally created to serve African-Americans and Asian-Americans respectively, and that the firm’s management frequently ridiculed the Largo branch office and its staff, referring to it as a “diversity” office. On April 23, 2007, U.S. District Judge, Peter J. Messitte, granted plaintiff's request to dismiss the class allegations without prejudice. As a result of this dismissal, the case now comprises the individual claims of three plaintiffs. <20><21>

In an article published by Reuters on Feb 23, 2008, Brazilian public prosecutor Karen Kahn announced that several employees of UBS as well as others from Credit Suisse, Clariden Leu and AIG were under investigation by federal authorities.<22> In 2007, police arrested 20 people, including bankers at UBS, Credit Suisse unit Clariden and AIG Private Bank after the discovery of illegal activities including money laundering, tax evasion, fraudulent banking and operating without a banking license.<23>

In an article published in BusinessWeek on February 26, 2007, it was announced that the firm was under investigation by federal prosecutors in the United States after it was discovered that traders working for at least two unidentified hedge funds were paying a UBS employee for information on impending ratings changes on stocks.<3> It was later announced on March 1st, that Mitchel S.Guttenberg, an executive director in the firm's equity research department, was being charged along with 13 other individuals from various firms with insider-trading fraud of more than $15 million. <24>

During the third quarter of 2007. Peter Wuffli stepped down as CEO of the firm amid significant writedowns related to subprime banking exposure (CDO's/derivatives) in the United States. More than US$13 billion in mezzanine debt and more than US$20 billion in total subprime exposure were written off, forcing UBS to cut its dividend or increase capital in order to protect UBS's traditionally high tier 1 capital ratio, seen by investors as a key to its credibility as the world's largest wealth management company.

On April 1st, 2008 UBS announced—and it was writing down a further $19 billion on its investments in American subprime and other mortgages, as part of an unexpected SFr12 billion projected loss in the first quarter. The Swiss bank also said it would call on its shareholders to supply SFr15 billion in additional funds to shore up its depleted reserves of capital. That means shareholders face dilution, and UBS's sovereign-wealth backers may add to the potential losses (albeit paper ones) they have suffered since December. In penance, Marcel Ospel, architect of the merger that created UBS in 1998, said he would step down as chairman, to be replaced by Peter Kurer, the bank’s general counsel. With only 86% approval this appointment was controversial at the shareholders meeting. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, there were many "boos and hisses" upon the announcement of Kurer's appointment

On May 6th, 2008 UBS announced plans to cut 5,500 jobs by the middle of the next year, including new graduates hired in Fiscal Year 2008.<25>
It was reported on June 22, 2008 that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation had made a formal request to travel to Switzerland to probe a multi-million-dollar tax evasion case involving UBS.<26> The New York Times reported that the case could involve some 20,000 US citizens. This is reported to be a consequence of information revealed in 2006 by a UBS client at risk of prosecution for US tax evasion<27>.

On July 17, 2008 the US Senate disclosed that the U.S. loses around $100 billion annually due to offshore tax evasion.<28> The Senate report accused Swiss bank UBS AG and Liechtenstein's LGT Group for allegedly marketing tax-evasion strategies to wealthy Americans.<29> U.S. clients hold about 19,000 accounts at UBS, with an estimated $18 billion to $20 billion in assets, in Switzerland, according to the findings from the Senate probe and Justice Department prosecutors.<30>

.On July 23 The Wall Street Journal reported that Attorney General Cuomo is preparing fraud charges against UBS and US senior management. The suit alleges that 7 executives such as Robert Wolf and David Schulman sold securities in their own accounts while advising clients to buy, resulting in significant client losses. It is not known if this is true at this time.

Here's the link to the full Wiki article, as of 7/25/08:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_AG

(Edit to include link.)

[McCamy Taylor]

9. Wow! Thanks for the info. UBS is a nasty piece of work. And the Nazi ties----just appalling!

I did a little more research after hearing that UBS had done business with the Nazis. In 2000, they were forced to admit that they used slave labor from Auschwitz in a cement plant which they owned.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/869789.stm

One of the world's biggest banks, UBS of Switzerland, has admitted for the first time that it exploited Nazi slave labourers during World War II.

The bank has confirmed it owned a cement factory where SS officers forced at least 400 prisoners from the nearby Auschwitz concentration camp to work.

Swiss companies that used Nazi forced labour have been given the next three weeks to identify themselves or face possible lawsuits from former slave labourers and their families.

[hootinholler]

30. Is this the same Union Bank of which Prescott Bush was an officer?

Was his their US branch?

-Hoot

[nc4bo]

10. Bookmarking and kicking. nt

[AwakeAtLast]

11. This needs many more recs

and many more kicks!


:kick:

Great information! This needs to be spread far and wide!

:kick:

[Crabby Appleton]

12. At the end of 2002 UBS shut down the part of Enron they had bought

UBS had bought the energy trading operation (but not the trading book) and EnronOnline which UBS renamed UBSWenergy, these never made money for UBS so they closed them down.

[McCamy Taylor]

14. With the FERC report due to come out in 2003 not surprised. If only they

had shut down Phil Gramm. It seems to me they simply moved the Enron scam that revolved around energy to banking, which made good sense from a rip off artist point of view. Electricity is electricity. You can quantify it. You make the stuff, you transmit the stuff, someone uses it. If the price shoots up, you better have a damn good reason. Banking and investments, on the other hand, are a lot like gambling. There is a certain amount of "hoodoo" involved, superstition. Plus, the average American does not understand what is involved in the banking and investment industry so it is easier to convince the public that it was the investors who were to blame for investing their money unwisely. If the banks sell bad mortgages, the can convince the public that home buyers were to blame for accepting the bad mortgage rate.

[leveymg]

13. Some juicy context: UBS was involved with BCCI and Bin Laden in the Harken Energy deal with Bush

See, http://911-research.info/html/sources/sico.html

With numerous branches in dozens of countries, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was also the drug–money laundering bank for the Pakistani generals, simultaneously essential long term bin Laden supporters, nuclear proliferators and American allies. Paradoxically, Robert Gates, the CIA director under former President George Bush Sr., referred to BCCI as the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" in Senate testimony.


Most important, consider Dr. Alfred Hartmann, the multi–site executive, who was both the InterMaritime Bank's Vice President and no less than the chief financial officer of Mahfouz's BCCI Holdings of Luxembourg. Simultaneously, Dr. Hartmann was also the managing director of a subsidiary of BCCI, the Banque de Commerce et de Placements (BCP) in Geneva. It was BCP that helped to finance the business for the vice–president's son, George W. Bush.


In 1987, the original plan for George W. Bush's Harken Oil and Gas Company was to obtain 25 million dollars in investment capital from BCP, a joint venture between the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and BCCI, with BCCI as the controlling interest.


Harken's financing by BCP of Geneva was originally structured by billionaire Bush donor, Jackson Stephens from Little Rock and apparently did not comply with U.S. banking regulations, according to the Asian Wall Street Journal. In the course of restructuring the deal, UBS decided to sell its shares as soon as possible.


Stephens obligingly found a new buyer for the UBS's share of Harken, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh. Sheikh Bakhsh was a principle shareholder in Mahfouz's BCCI until its 1992 collapse and a major investor in Stephens' own Worthen National Bank. Sheikh Bakhsh's purchase of 3.5 million Harken shares and eventually 20.8 percent of the total outstanding, is documented in U.S. Security and Exchange Commission reports.


In this way, Bush's Harken deal was concluded with the BCCI's Geneva subsidiary, BCP, whose managing director and man–of–a–thousand–faces, Dr. Hartmann, was also the chairman of the the Swiss affiliate of yet another criminal bank, the Italian Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL). According to the Congressional Record in 1992, Dr. Hartmann's bank, BNL was alleged by U.S. House Banking Committee Chairman Henry Gonzalez, to have secured billions of dollars in illegally–used, weapons–directed loans from the first Bush administration to Saddam Hussein just prior to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.


After 1996, George W. Bush's Harken–investor, Sheikh Bakhsh, was a principle shareholder in Mahfouz's Middle East Capital Group, a British offshore investment bank involving the Saudi BinLaden Group (SBG), the bin Laden family's giant construction and investment conglomerate.


The Saudi BinLaden Group is partners with Mahfouz in the Saudi Investment Corporation (SICO). In turn, SICO was covertly involved in supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the late 1980's, in connection with the BCCI–controlled National Bank of Oman. Arranging SICO's capitalization of Osama bin Laden were the top two InterMaritime Bank executives, Alfred Hartmann of Harken and Bruce Rappaport, in addition to the infamous deceased CIA director, William Casey.


Thus, during the late 1980s, the ubi$quotes[] Harken financier, Dr. Alfred Hartmann, was both rearming Saddam Hussein and supporting Osama bin Laden's Jihad. With BCCI Holdings having Dr. Hartmann as CFO, Hartmann was at the very center of Mahfouz's BCCI scandal, a more than 13 billion dollar bank loss, termed "the largest bank fraud in world financial history" by Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morganthau.


By 1990, Harken's financial practice look more like an "is of Evil" network than an oil company. The soup thickens when one looks at the overall business resume of our "EO President" and that of his business partners.

[McCamy Taylor]

15. At some point, one must start to wonder, does UBS have a deal to cover up for the Bush family

so that they provided jobs for executives from Enron so that they would not be tempted to sell their stories or talk to plaintiffs and they bought assets to keep certain creditors happy for the same reason. And if so, what has the Bush family done for them? The obvious conclusion would be that certain people at the CIA has the goods on UBS's WWII Nazi collaboration. Allen Dulles, who according to the link I gave above, helped the Thyssens recover their fortune (which had aided the Nazis at the end of WWII), may have uncovered secrets of the UBS as well. He could have also uncovered (and hidden) secrets of the Bush family and its banking relationship with Thyssen and the Nazis. And then, when George Bush Sr. became CIA head, he would have gained access to all the information that Dulles had about the Nazi ties of corporations like UBS. During the Cold War, this info could be used either for blackmail to force companies and people to spy on Russia or more likely to locate right wingers who would be sympathetic to U.S. goals of weakening the Soviet block. The ex-Nazi collaborators would have formed a nice cozy little group with people like the Bushes, in government, in intelligence and in business.

[tanyev]

18. Now I'm more curious than ever to see who is on their list of tax-dodge clients.

[The Backlash Cometh]

17. Everything seems to go back to BCCI

[Joanne98]

26. Oh man! Great catch!

[AllyCat]

27. They aren't called the Bush Crime Family for nothing

They make the Mob look like circus clowns

[The Backlash Cometh]

16. Good job!

[chat_noir]

19. wow! This needs to be added to the Enron topic in the DU Research Forum

Enron Scandals http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_oet&address=358x2912

[nashville_brook]

20. bookmarked, printed, emailed, kicked and rec'd

:evilgrin:

great piece!

[seemslikeadream]

21. KICK!

[truedelphi]

22. This is one of the most eloquent OP's I have ever seen on DU. Thank you for it

I would like to point out that right now the entire workings of the United States Monetary system is a rather Enron-like enterprise.

First the big banks see to it (behind the scenes) that smaller banks, banks that they would like to acquire, are investigated.

Then the government enables them to buy the smaller bank up, using tax payer dollars.

Look at JP Morgan's acquisition of Bear Stearns.

Then a little while later the financial press acknowledges how well this manipulation of taxpayer money worked.

Then another institution slides into failure mode. Then it is either bailed out or bought up.

And the financial people again say, stocks rallied today, all is well, the system is working.

Much as how Ken Lay told his employees to keep buying th stock offered by Enron, even though he knew that his own shares were being sold.

Our banking system is incrementally failing this year. Institution by institution. And nothing is there to prevent the final melt down, which will occur as soon as every piece of change owned by the lower and middle income classes rest inside the greasy palms of a few of the people at the top.

[Greyhound]

23. As more and more is exposed in this melt down, it should become apparent to even the most

brainwashed moran that there is a relatively small group of major players that have been pushing this scenario on the world. The old 'Deep Throat' quote, "follow the money", is still the best indicator of who's doing what and to whom.

:kick: & R

[happydreams]

24. Max Warburg was hired by Granddaddy Prescott Bush to oversea

the German operations of Harriman bank


....Averell Harriman and Bert Walker had gained control over the steamship company in 1920 in negotiations with its post-World War I chief executive, Wilhelm Cuno, and with the line's bankers, M.M. Warburg. Cuno was thereafter completely dependent on the Anglo-Americans, and became a member of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In the 1930-32 drive for a Hitler dictatorship, Wilhelm Cuno contributed important sums to the Nazi Party.@s2@s3.........

.....Prescott Bush's American Ship and Commerce Corp. notified Max Warburg of Hamburg, Germany, on March 7, 1933, that Warburg was to be the corporation's official, designated representative on the board of Hamburg-Amerika.@s2@s9

Max Warburg replied on March 27, 1933, assuring his American sponsors that the Hitler government was good for Germany: `` For the last few years business was considerably better than we had anticipated, but a reaction is making itself felt for some months. We are actually suffering also under the very active propaganda against Germany, caused by some unpleasant circumstances. These occurrences were the natural consequence of the very excited election campaign, but were extraordinarily exaggerated in the foreign press. The Government is firmly resolved to maintain public peace and order in Germany, and I feel perfectly convinced in this respect that there is no cause for any alarm whatsoever. ''@s3@s0







http://www.tarpley.net/bush2.htm

[Joanne98]

25. OMG! You're right. I forgot all about UBS buying Enron's on-line trading unit!

BAD ME!

:spank:

:yourock:

[Disturbed]

28. McLame is part of this corruption. He cannot weasle his way

out of this as he did with the Keating Five Fiasco.

[Baby Snooks]

29. The asset trail...

Most of the assets were sold quickly and sold to "insiders" which only furthered the fraud perpetrated on the employees and the shareholders.

And do you think anyone is going to anything? Of course not.

[pathwhisperer]

31. These guys even cheat each other

At the time UBS picked up the Enron trading arm, I was working at UBS and a banker friend bragged how they had picked up Enron's trading arm for a percentage of future profits, i.e., through the magic of accounting almost for free (the profits could be made to never show up on the profit/loss statements).

Enron was thoroughly a sociopathic scam, down to the Grandma Millie quote showing their outrageous contempt for the duped. http://pathwhisperer.wordpress.com/proposal-to-ubs-upper-management/