Poor Accounting Frustrates MF Global Probe

Investigators looking into what exactly happened to the $600 million in client funds that went missing amid the collapse of commodities firm MF Global have been snarled by the company’s poor record keeping practices, making it difficult to ascertain what went where and how, according to the New York Times. Even the total amount of money missing is more of a rough estimate, according to the Wall Street Journal, which quoted a lawyer for the company’s trustees as saying that no one can give a real figure as to how much is gone, and that it might be larger or smaller than the oft-quoted $600 million.

There was also some confusion over the number of customer accounts that the trustee’s office was looking into, according to the Wall Street Journal, with the aforementioned attorney saying at first that it was overseeing about 50,000 customer accounts, about 17,000 of which had been transferred to other brokerage firms; after an audit, however, the numbers changed to 38,000 individual customer accounts, 14,500 of which were already transferred to other brokerage firms.

Since the collapse of MF Global, led by former governor of New Jersey Jon S. Corzine at the time, this past Halloween, a panoply of regulators have been poring over the firm’s remains in a sort of financial autopsy. Although they are apparently not even close to getting to the bottom of what exactly happened, according to the New York Times, suspicions of ill-dealings are already starting to arise. The firm has already been targeted by federal subpoenas, according to Bloomberg, and is also the subject of an FBI criminal investigation.