Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Richard M. Bowen III wants to leave this country better off than the way he found it for the good of the next generation. So does this public interest web site. So do most Americans. Unfortunately, we all have a serious roadblock: the sealers, redactors, censors and enablers who are keeping Wall Street’s crimes from seeing the light of day in a public courtroom and its criminals from observing the shadows of a darkened cell.
Yesterday, journalist William D. Cohan penned an “opinion” piece for the New York Times. (The word “opinion” was likely placed over the fact-intensive article to eliminate the potential for Brad Karp, Citigroup’s serial go-to lawyer for its serial get-out-of-jail free cards, to sue the New York Times.) The thrust of the article is that Brad Karp pressured the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, tasked by Congress to get to the bottom of the culprits and causes of the collapse of Wall Street in 2008, to censor part of whistleblower Richard M. Bowen’s public testimony before the Commission. Karp, who works for the Wall Street law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, is quoted in the article as denying the charges.
As Wall Street On Parade previously reported, Bowen is the Citigroup whistleblower who appeared on the December 4, 2011 edition of 60 Minutes, telling viewers that once he brought the internal corruption to the attention of the most senior executives at Citigroup, including Board Member Robert Rubin, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, he had his duties reassigned and was told to remain off the premises.
Cohan reports in the New York Times that “Mr. Bowen says the F.C.I.C. wanted him to delete his concern that Citi may have materially misrepresented its certifications of internal controls, which require corporate officers to certify the accuracy of their financial statements under Sarbanes-Oxley.” Bowen says he was also pressured to “Remove the names of people at Citi…Take out his post-Rubin denouement, his conversations with the bank’s internal lawyers and the fact that Citigroup’s outside attorneys at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP were conducting an investigation of his charges.”
Phil Angelides led the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. He told Cohan he had no knowledge of Bowen being censored. He does concede, however, that the Wall Street banks “and their phalanx of attorneys were putting enormous pressure” on the commission “every day of every week with every witness” in an effort “to discredit people who were testifying against their interests.”
Brad Karp has been tapped so frequently by Citigroup for its seemingly never-ending fraud charges that we previously queried if Brad Karp has some secret sauce for getting the banking behemoth off the hook. It was lucky indeed for Karp when the deeply-conflicted arbitrators hearing the $4 billion fraud allegations against Citigroup by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), refused to permit discovery on Bowen’s claims that Citigroup’s top executives were aware of financial skullduggery afoot at the firm three weeks before the company accepted a $7.5 billion infusion of cash from ADIA.
…
