The Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that is supposed to protect investors from Wall Street predators, says it is going to investigate how it missed the Bernie Madoff scam. San Diego’s Gary Aguirre, speaking from personal experience, knows that’s impossible. Any securities agency probe will be a cover-up.
New York’s Madoff ran a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. The securities commission admits that allegations about Madoff’s scheme had been repeatedly brought to the agency’s attention since 1999. “I am gravely concerned by the apparent multiple failures over at least a decade to thoroughly investigate these allegations,” proclaimed the agency’s Bush-era chairman, Christopher Cox, last month, announcing the supposed self-probe.
Balderdash. The only thing Cox is “gravely concerned” about is that the American public might finally understand the agency’s actual mission. For as Aguirre, a former attorney for the agency, points out, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) does not exist to protect investors from Wall Street predators. It exists to protect powerful Wall Street predators from investors.
The notion that the agency can probe its own officials is hilarious — a real knee-slapper. In late December, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) heaped scorn on the securities agency’s ability to investigate itself in the Gary Aguirre case. Now the agency says it will open that probe again. “Reopening the investigation marks a new embarrassment for the beleaguered S.E.C., suggesting that, as in the Bernard Madoff case, it may have failed earlier to follow up adequately on strong indications of possible wrongdoing,” says Portfolio.com.
Aguirre puts it more strongly: the securities agency “cannot be trusted with an investigation of itself, especially when the investigation [involves] the highest levels of the SEC.”
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