Banco Santander SA sold Bernard Madoff investments to a teacher and a street vendor, not just to wealthy private banking clients in Spain

Banco Santander SA sold Bernard Madoff investments to a teacher and a street vendor, not just to wealthy private banking clients in Spain and Latin America.Branch managers channeled customers with money from property sales or inheritances to private banking salespeople, lawyers for the investors said. A retired school teacher put 300,000 euros ($388,000), half her savings, in a structured product linked to Madoff, said Jordi Ruiz de Villa, an attorney at the Barcelona law firm Jausas. The vendor invested 325,000 euros of lottery winnings in a similar...

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Joseph Bruno,faces a maximum of 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines on each of the counts.

Joseph Bruno, one of the state's three most powerful officials for more than a dozen years, was indicted yesterday for allegedly taking $3 million in bogus consulting fees and other scams - including selling a "worthless" racehorse for $80,000 to a fat-cat friend. The upstate Republican's schemes to use his public position to enrich himself began even before he landed the Senate's top post on Thanksgiving Day 1994, and they eventually involved 16 labor unions and more than a dozen companies, the eight-count indictment alleged. The 79-year-old former...

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lawyer says the two sons of disgraced U.S. financial investor Bernard Madoff had no knowledge of their father's allegedly fraudulent dealings.

lawyer says the two sons of disgraced U.S. financial investor Bernard Madoff had no knowledge of their father's allegedly fraudulent dealings.Attorney Martin Flumenbaum, who is representing Mark and Andrew Madoff, said the brothers only learned about their father's alleged actions a day before the former Nasdaq stock exchange chairman was arrested in December, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.Flumenbaum said Mark, 44, and Andrew, 42, told authorities of their father's allegedly illegal activities.Both siblings work at the brokerage arm...

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Royal Bank of Scotland investigated by the Serious Fraud Office to find out whether shareholders were misled over last year's £12bn rights issue

Royal Bank of Scotland investigated by the Serious Fraud Office to find out whether shareholders were misled over last year's £12bn rights issue, according to a senior Scottish politician.Tavish Scott, the Liberal Democrat leader, said taxpayers had the right to know whether RBS chiefs had fully disclosed the dire nature of the bank's financial position when shareholders pumped in billions of pounds of new capital last April in an attempt to keep the bank afloat.Scott made the call at the end of a disastrous week which saw the once-proud institution...

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Two partners of Price Waterhouse have been arrested

Two partners of Price Waterhouse, the firm that audited fraud-hit Satyam Computer Services’ books, have been arrested, police said Saturday.The Crime Investigation Department (CID) of the Andhra Pradesh police, probing the Rs.70 billion (Rs.7,000 crore/$1.43 billion) fraud in the IT bellwether, arrested chief relationship partner S. Gopalakrishnan and engagement leader Srinivas Taluri Friday night. Price Waterhouse is the Indian arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the global auditing firm.CID announced the arrests Saturday evening. ‘We have arrested...

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Contractor, Maurice Subilia, 64, of Kennebunk, is scheduled to appear at a Feb. 2 hearing in Federal District Court

Contractor, Maurice Subilia, 64, of Kennebunk, is scheduled to appear at a Feb. 2 hearing in Federal District Court, according to the newspaper, The Portland Press Herald. The agreement to plead guilty was spelled out in a court document, the newspaper reported.Mr. Subilia’s lawyer, Toby Dilworth, declined to comment.Mr. Subilia, former president of Fiber Materials Inc. in Biddeford, is accused of orchestrating a conspiracy that involved two officials at the Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala. He faces up to 20 years in prison.Prosecutors...

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Eduardo A. Masferrer was found guilty Wednesday of masterminding a $20 million bank fraud

Eduardo A. Masferrer was found guilty Wednesday of masterminding a $20 million bank fraud and then weaving a web of lies to conceal it. After only a few hours of deliberation, 12 jurors averted their eyes as they filed into federal court in Miami and then sat stone-faced as the court deputy read 16 guilty counts against Masferrer, the former chairman and CEO of Hamilton Bank. It was a stunning reversal for Masferrer, who was once the toast of Miami banking and charitable circles. During his first trial, the jury deadlocked, resulting in a mistrial...

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State prosecutors say James Harrison used the Viola and Oscar Allen Trust as his “own personal piggy bank” for 14 years.

Ukiah banker pleaded not guilty in Mendocino County Superior Court Wednesday morning to embezzling $421,000 from a dead couple’s trust account instead of turning the money over for student scholarships.State prosecutors say James Harrison used the Viola and Oscar Allen Trust as his “own personal piggy bank” for 14 years.He is charged with misappropriation of trust assets and three counts of wilfully filing false tax returns.Harrison is a former vice president of locally owned Savings Bank of Mendocino County. He resigned in 2005 after his employer...

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Rod Cameron Stringer misappropriated millions of dollars from investors

Rod Cameron Stringer misappropriated millions of dollars from investors since 2001, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in a federal lawsuit filed in Lubbock, Texas. The resident of Lamesa, 60 miles south of Lubbock, said he generated annual profits as high as 61 percent, according to the suit. “Stringer’s claims regarding the hedge fund and the high rates of return are completely bogus,” the regulator said in the suit. Besides running the fund, the agency said the 43-year-old worked as a bail bondsman, a tow-truck driver and a crop-dusting...

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Auriga International Advisers, a hedge fund registered in the British Virgin Islands, has lost over 400 million Swiss francs ($350 million)

Auriga International Advisers, a hedge fund registered in the British Virgin Islands, has lost over 400 million Swiss francs ($350 million) that were invested with Bernard Madoff, the company's main shareholder said Wednesday.Jacques Rauber, who is described as the majority shareholder of Auriga International Advisers in a 2007 filing to Britain's business register, confirmed reports in Swiss weekly SonntagsZeitung that the company's Auriga International fund was wholly invested in Fairfield Sentry.That U.S.-based fund, in turn, had invested all...

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Charged Arthur G. Nadel,with fraud, saying he misled investors and overstated the value of investments in the six funds by about $300 million.

Federal regulators on Wednesday charged a missing hedge fund manager with fraud, saying he misled investors and overstated the value of investments in the six funds by about $300 million.The Securities and Exchange Commission won a court order freezing the assets of Arthur G. Nadel, of Sarasota, Fla., and other defendants in the case.Nadel owed investors a $50 million payout, told his wife in a note he felt guilty and threatened to kill himself, according to the Sarasota County Sheriff's Office. The authorities believe that Nadel, 76, planned his...

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Kosta Kovachev, 57, is charged in a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York

Kosta Kovachev, 57, is charged in a criminal complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.The government alleges in a separate criminal complaint that Dreier sold as much as $380 million in fake promissory notes from 2006 to 2008 to three hedge funds in the name of a New York real estate development company.The developer later told the government it was in the dark about the sales and that the notes were bogus. The names of the hedge funds and developer were not...

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Maytas Infra Ltd (MAIL.BO) denied on Tuesday it had received funds from fraud-hit Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services Ltd (SATY.BO)

Maytas Infra Ltd (MAIL.BO) denied on Tuesday it had received funds from fraud-hit Indian outsourcer Satyam Computer Services Ltd (SATY.BO), a day after India extended its probe to the linked construction firm.On Monday, the Indian government said the probe into Satyam, which is at the centre of India's biggest corporate scandal, had been widened to include Maytas Properties and Maytas Infra, two companies in which Satyam founders hold stakes. "Maytas Infra categorically states that there has been no receipt or utilisation of any funds belonging...

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Rajesh Kumar, a 35-year-old Fiji native, was arrested Sunday in Sacramento on a $250,000 warrant alleging fraud.

Rajesh Kumar, a 35-year-old Fiji native, was arrested Sunday in Sacramento on a $250,000 warrant alleging fraud. Kumar is accused of defrauding a woman who took cover and survived the Dec. 27, 2007, shootings that killed Ravinder Kalsi and his brother, Paramjit Kalsi.Police have said they do not believe Kumar was the shooter in that case and declined to give details of the alleged fraud.The brothers were closing up Sahib Indian Restaurant at 12221 San Pablo Ave. at about 9 p.m. when two people approached the door. As Ravinder, 30, let them in,...

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Three suspects in a $200,000 fraud and extortion investigation were taken into custody

Three suspects in a $200,000 fraud and extortion investigation were taken into custody Thursday in Thurston County. They were booked into the Thurston County Jail on charges of residential burglary and attempted first-degree theft. The Thurston County Sheriff's Office has been investigating the case since spring of 2008, when the suspects allegedly tried to sell a replacement mobile home to a victim. The suspects allegedly told the victim his home needed to be demolished, and they would help replace it. Detectives say the suspects kept asking for...

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Heartland Payment Systems, the sixth-largest payments processor in the U.S., announced today that its processing systems were breached

Heartland Payment Systems, the sixth-largest payments processor in the U.S., announced today that its processing systems were breached in 2008, exposing an undetermined number of consumers to potential fraud. While the company continues to assess the damages inflicted by the attack, Robert Baldwin, the company's president and CFO, says law enforcement has already noted that the attack against his company is part of a wider cyber fraud operation. "The indication that it is tied to wider cyber fraud operation comes directly from conversations with...

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