Posts Tagged: Dick Fuld
12

Flowers of Evil

It's a funny thing, fidelity. Last week's enormous bankruptcy-report filing on shady financial practices at the late Lehman Brothers investment house depicts an internal braintrust desperate to conceal reckless debt transactions and deceptive accounting practices from public view. The court-appointed examiner in the firm's bankruptcy proceedings, Anton Valukas, found that senior Lehman officials tried to alert their bosses of blatant efforts to reclassify debt as "sales" under a recondite accounting trick known in house as "Repo 105"-so named because it permitted the company to assess buy-back transactions of assets sold for cash at a value representing 105% or more of the cash the company actually pulled in. And presto, Valukas [...]