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To: BDR who wrote (182253)	7/23/2002 12:11:17 AM
From: KeepItSimple	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Citibank is finished. This article is completely damning- and more evidence will surely follow. I'm not joking. They're about to join Arthur Anderson on the scrapheap of corporate greed. Does this mean I don't have to pay this months balance on my citibank card? :) -------------------------- The documents amount to the most in-depth evidence yet of the extent to which Citigroup, the nation's largest financial institution, helped Enron disguise debt on its balance sheet

To: BDR who wrote (182253)	7/26/2002 12:44:11 AM
From: BDR	Respond to of 436258

Investment bankers slip past eager reformers By Peter Spiegel in Washington Published: July 23 2002 20:18 \| Last Updated: July 23 2002 20:18 news.ft.com US legislators and regulators are casting a wide net in their attempt to put new restraints on accountants, senior corporate managers and boards of directors. But at least one part of the financial world has gone largely unscathed: Wall Street bankers, who congressional investigators now believe played a central role in some of the corporate scandals currently unfolding, particularly at Enron. Most of the Wall Street reform agenda in Congress and at the Securities and Exchange Commission has focused on securities analysts, who have been widely criticised for hyping stocks they knew were bad bets for the benefit of their firms' investment banking arms. Ire over the analysts' role reached such a peak that this week Mike Oxley, the influential chairman of the House financial services committee, cheered on a National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) investigation of Jack Grubman, the Salomon telecoms analyst who has been closely tied to WorldCom. In addition, the Senate version of a sweeping reform bill being hashed out by congressional negotiators contains new prohibitions on analysts, including bans on investment bank links to research operations. But investment bankers themselves have come under little scrutiny. Neither the House or the Senate reform bills have any provisions dealing with investment bankers. Even Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who has uncovered many of the alleged abuses by banks, offered no new banking reforms when the bill was debated in the Senate. Indeed, the large Wall Street firms have seen an unprecedented wave of deregulation come out of Washington in recent years, capped by the 1999 law known as Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which broke down 1930s-era walls preventing brokerage firms from moving into other financial services, such as insurance. Part of Wall Street's success in keeping regulators and legislators at bay, critics charge, is the immense amount of money the firms spend on political donations and lobbying. According to a study conducted by the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan watchdog group, Wall Street banks and securities firms donated more than $30m (€30m, £19m) to politicians and their parties in 1999 while the deregulation was being debated. Citigroup, which has been perhaps the most active of the Wall Street firms in Washington, spent $25m in lobbying in the three years leading up to Gramm-Leach-Bliley, one of the largest expenditures on influence peddling by any US company over the period. The banks have not let up. Commercial banks donated $1.3m to George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 2000, four times what they gave to his opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore. Citigroup gave $2.8m to political campaigns in 2000, and has already donated $1.4m to congressional candidates for the 2002 election.