The South China Morning Post will take its content in a different direction under Alibaba. (Image: http://www.buzzfeed.com)

Last Friday, Alibaba (ticker BABA), the Chinese e-commerce Leviathan with a $200 billion market cap, announced that it was buying the South China Morning Post (“SCMP”), Hong Kong’s biggest English-language newspaper. The 112-year-old broadsheet is popular for its English-language format and the editorial board’s intrepid reputation (or life-threatening stupidity/naiveté) for covering not only political contretemps on mainland China but also the Communist Party’s gobsmackingly disgraceful suppression of human rights, topics from which mainland journalists understandably shy away for fear of being “disappeared.”

Laying it on extra thick, as would any self-respecting grifter, Joe Tsai, Alibaba’s no doubt unironically titled Vice Chairman, reassured SCMP’s readers in a press release: Continue reading →

A source at ISIS Pharmaceuticals (ticker ISIS) has told Bud Fox News that the company was inundated with phone calls last week from men who mistakenly thought that the company was a US-based offshoot of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, aka ISIS. Company spokesman Stuyvesant Gudgeon explained:

We’ve been swamped. I took several calls myself. These men are convinced that we represent ISIS here in the States. Some had looked through our annual report and concluded that the table showing our drug pipeline was actually a list of chemical weapons that caused the conditions addressed by each drug. One guy called and asked how quickly ATL1102 would cause Muliple Sclerosis and could it be put in the water supply. Another guy asked to speak to our chief financial officer because he needed money- he said a guy at his mosque could get an RPG if the caller could produce enough cash. 

Here is the pipeline table from the company’s 2014 10-K:

Would-be jihadis mistook these drugs for chemical weapons. (Image: ISIS 10-K, http://www.sec.gov)

These misguided, US-hating Mujahideen manqués aren’t the only ones who have been fooled. Hous Bin Pharteen, Professor of Islamic Studies at Beaver College and author of the soon-to-be-published Allah vs Challa: Islam and the Defeat of Zionism, appeared equally misled when reached for comment by Bud Fox News:  Continue reading →

“I swear to recuse myself, so help me God” (photo: New York Times)

Over a long and storied career, Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman Mary Jo White developed a reputation for being a tough prosecutor and litigator, belying her diminutive stature. But she’s not so tough anymore.

As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, when she wasn’t facing down mobsters like John Gotti, she was putting terrorists like Ramzi Yousef (the 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind) under the hot lamps. After her time as a prosecutor, she spent 10 years as chair of the litigation department at Devevoise & Plimpton, a white shoe New York City law firm.

As an unfortunate byproduct of this otherwise fruitful juridical pilgrimage, Ms. White came to know many characters on Wall Street, big business bosses, regulators, law makers, and prosecutors. When one runs in these rarefied circles long enough, you eventually become friendly with many of your “adversaries” and a system of favors and quid-pro-quo’s develops which helps maintain a stasis between the various powers of big business, government, and regulatory institutions.

A fine example of this is found in the story of Gary Aguirre, as well detailed in this Rolling Stone piece.

Aguirre joined the SEC in September 2004. Two days into his career as a financial investigator, he was asked to look into an insider-trading complaint against a hedge-fund megastar named Art Samberg. One day, with no advance research or discussion, Samberg had suddenly started buying up huge quantities of shares in a firm called Heller Financial. “It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller,” Aguirre recalls. “And he wasn’t just buying shares — there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day.” A few weeks later, Heller was bought by General Electric — and Samberg pocketed $18 million.

After some digging, Aguirre found himself focusing on one suspect as the likely source who had tipped Samberg off: John Mack, a close friend of Samberg’s who had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley. At the time, Mack had been on Samberg’s case to cut him into a deal involving a spinoff of the tech company Lucent — an investment that stood to make Mack a lot of money. “Mack is busting my chops” to give him a piece of the action, Samberg told an employee in an e-mail.

A week later, Mack flew to Switzerland to interview for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston. Among the investment bank’s clients, as it happened, was a firm called Heller Financial. We don’t know for sure what Mack learned on his Swiss trip; years later, Mack would claim that he had thrown away his notes about the meetings. But we do know that as soon as Mack returned from the trip, on a Friday, he called up his buddy Samberg. The very next morning, Mack was cut into the Lucent deal — a favor that netted him more than $10 million. And as soon as the market reopened after the weekend, Samberg started buying every Heller share in sight, right before it was snapped up by GE — a suspiciously timed move that earned him the equivalent of Derek Jeter’s annual salary for just a few minutes of work.

The case seemed open and shut, but as Aguirre would soon find out, it was mostly shut. In the summer of 2005 when Aguirre told his boss he planned to interview Mack, things “started to get weird”. Aguirre was “contacted” (read hounded) by folks from Morgan Stanley, then an aide to New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, then the SEC got a call from one of the firm’s top dog lawyers: none other than, you guessed it, Mary Jo White, herself the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York- the top cop on Wall Street. Continue reading →

Seating on the “Chairman’s Route” was no better than usual…(Picture: http://www.sausedo.net)

Reported last week, the recent contretemps that resulted in the resignation of United Continental CEO Jeff Smisek raises a question often debated in the sordid aftermath of shameless crony capitalism: Was it a bribe or blackmail?

Back in 2011, United Continental, the largest airline by passenger volume (70% of traffic) at Port Authority-controlled Newark International Airport, sought to renegotiate its lease agreement there (and get approval for a wide-body maintenance hangar) as well as obtain funding from the PA for a $600 million extension of the PATH commuter train from downtown Manhattan to the airport. At a fat-cat dinner in September of that year, PA Chairman David Samson, who was appointed PA potentate by Chris Christie but resigned in March 2014 as US Attorney Paul Fishman’s “Bridgegate” investigation widened (to include topics like United’s dealings with the PA), did what any self-respecting New Jersey autocrat would do:

Halfway through dinner at Novita, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, Port Authority Chairman David Samson surprised the group with a request of his own. He complained that he and his wife had grown weary of the trip to their weekend home in Aiken, South Carolina, because the best flight out of Newark was to Charlotte, North Carolina, 150 miles away. Until 2009, Continental had run direct service from Newark to Columbia, South Carolina, 100 miles closer. In a tone described by one observer as “playful, but not joking,” Samson asked: Could United revive that route? An awkward silence fell over the table.

Continue reading →