Swiss Bank Employee Embezzles $2.8M to Fund Gambling HabitMonday, October 26, 2009
NEUHAUSEN AM RHEINFALL, Switzerland — Swiss police say a bank employee has admitted stealing millions from the bank's safe to fund her $60-89,000 a week gambling habit.
Police in the northern canton of Schaffhausen say the 41-year-old woman confessed to embezzling $2.8 million over the course of five years.
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Back-Door Taxes Hit Americans With Public Financing in the Dark Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Salvatore Calvanese, the treasurer of Springfield, Massachusetts, for four years, had a ready defense for why he risked $14 million of taxpayer money on collateralized-debt obligations laden with subprime mortgages in 2007.
He didn’t know what he was buying, he says, and trusted the financial professionals who sold them and told him they were safe.
“I thought they were money markets that were just paying more,” Calvanese said in an interview. “Nobody ever used the term ‘CDO,’ and I am not sure I would have known what that was anyway.”
Such financial mistakes, often enabled by public officials’ lack of disclosure and accountability for almost 90 percent of government financings in the $2.8 trillion municipal bond market, are costing U.S. taxpayers as much as $6 billion a year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg in more than a dozen states.
The money lost to taxpayers -- when the worst recession since the Great Depression is forcing local governments to cut university funding, delay paying bills and raise taxes -- is enough to buy health care for everybody in Minneapolis; Orlando, Florida; and Grand Rapids, Michigan, according to figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
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Madoff Billionaire Found Dead in Palm Beach Swimming Pool
Jeffry Picower 'Cleared' $7 Billion in Ponzi Scheme; Faced Civil and Possible Criminal Charges
The man who made $7 billion in the
Bernie Madoff Ponzi
scheme, Jeffry Picower, was found dead in his Palm Beach, Fla., swimming pool Sunday.
The Palm Beach Fire Department told ABC News that Picower had no pulse when fire rescue workers arrived at his oceanfront mansion after his wife called 911. She and his housekeeper pulled his body from the pool shortly after noon.
No one benefited more from the Madoff scheme that Picower, according to bankruptcy lawyers who sued him and alleged he had taken out $7 billion more than he had put in.
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