Weekend reading: Full report on SEC’s Madoff mess
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Now available on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website: the full 457-page report by the SEC’s inspector general on how the agency repeatedly failed to detect Bernie Madoff’s 16-year-long Ponzi scheme.
One theme of the report, as highlighted in the summary the SEC released on Wednesday, is how Madoff was able to intimidate inexperienced SEC staffers who conducted examinations of the swindler’s business.
The report includes this testimony from an SEC attorney, recounting an episode during a 2005 examination:
‘[W]e were asking for documents or something and he got . . . it was sort of disconcerting how angry he became. I mean his veins were popping out of his neck, and . . . he just repeatedly said, you know, ‘What are you looking for?’ And his voice level got increasingly loud and the veins were popping out, and one of us -- I may have said something, you know, ‘What do you want us to look for? What do you think we’re looking for?’ ‘
-- Tom Petruno