First of all, the highs. Those worried about the world having potentially deviated from its traditional axis will be relieved to note that the 33 top staff at London hedge fund NewSmith shared a bonus pot of £30m between them for their previous year’s work, despite the company having seen £2bn withdrawn from its funds over the last 18 months. What’s more, even if you didn’t get to buy a yacht this year, next year’s looking good. Hedge fund index Eurekahedge said yesterday that its index has grown for the seventh straight month, the best performance in a decade. It matches the findings of Hedgefund.net, who reported rising levels of investment over the last five months, bringing total assets under management across the sector to nearly $2tn, heading back towards the pre-crisis peak of $3tn; and Lipper Global Hedge Fund Classifications, who said the vast majority of funds turned a profit last month.

The hedge fund industry is also looking strong in the face of potential tough regulation on its activities by the EU. Since Sharon Bowles, the chair of the parliamentary Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs said that most of the European Parliament agreed on making the regulation lighter, both Boris Johnson and even the Church of England have weighed into the debate calling for the same light touch – Johnson because 80% of the European hedge fund industry is in London and he doesn’t want to see it go to Switzerland, the Church because hedge funds are one of their favoured investments. Hearteningly, managers are saying that even if new directives came in they still have faith in London, one recently comparing it to the Wimbledon tennis tournament: “Businesses come to London because they have the best courts, the best talent, the best infrastructure, and a great championship”. Hedge fund managers are meanwhile also fighting Russian corruption and telling Tim Geithner how to run the Treasury – the industry seems to be well on the way to profitability and respectability, right?

Well, no. On the front page of the FT today is “one in five hedge fund managers found to be misrepresenting facts”; more euphemisms come later with “hedge fund managers’ representations about their funds differed from reality”. Yes, between-line-reader – one in five hedge fund managers are lying scumbags, who will tell you that their fund has hundreds of millions of dollars under management and that most of their profits are spent on helping injured kittens. Or, in the case of one fund, they’ll tell you their partners have no criminal record but it later emerges that actually they do, having stolen a Chinese sailing boat (?!) in the past.

Dragging the industry further into the mire is the case of the ex-Bear Stearns employees who are accused of fraud, by lying to investors about the health of their hedge funds (which were backed by that reliably fund-destroying asset, the sub-prime mortgage); the trial of Matthew Tannin and Ralph Cioffi, who is also accused of insider trading, started yesterday. Boris Johnson’s flagwaving for the industry is facing scrutiny, after it was revealed that over half of his election campaign war chest came from the financial sector (including from hedge funds). And while some managers are sloppily comparing London to prestigious tennis tournaments, there are others who are still saying they’ll bugger off to Asia if the EU directives are passed, purely because the rules won’t let them operate.

The new rules in their current form would prevent EU investors from investing in non-EU-based funds, as well as preventing them from keeping their holdings in non-EU banks – UK investors would have a much smaller pool of potential investments to choose from, while funds would have a much smaller pool of clients. Now that the Church and various charities have entered the fray, saying that over-regulation could lead to their good work being hampered, the regulation waters have been muddied all the more. One thing remains clear – find out if your hedge fund manager has a predilection for stealing Chinese sailing ships before you invest.

Photo: Joe Dunckley

This being China, the news has taken nearly two years to start trickling out, with details of the court case begun last week making it into the FT this morning. One of the chairmen of developer Canton Properties, Wang Sheng, is accused of taking loans out in the company’s name from state-and-HSBC-owned Bank of Communications, and keeping them for himself. The president of the bank who allowed the loans has been on the run since the investigation was started in late 2007, making the attempts of his recent fraudulent peers in the States look very weak indeed. It’s in his interest to keep running – China’s state news agency reports today that the state has just executed two major fraudsters.

They’re not the only ones committing everyone’s favourite white collar crime though – check out these bozos from this week’s press: 

- First up is Edward Okun, who has been sentenced this week for running a fraud in which he used money given to him to invest in banks as pocket money for nice things like the divorce from his old wife and jewelry for his new one. He also bought his chums shots of cognac for $1,008 each during a holiday in the Bahamas, about which the restaurant owners still laugh now. In the overkill that saw Madoff get 150 years in jail, Okun was recommended 400 years – in the end he got off lightly with just 100.

- “Magician Paul Daniels helped his son escape jail today after he admitted stealing £10,000 from the NHS” is the opening paragraph in a Sun story today, but as is the case so often with the tabloids, they ruthlessly pique your interest only to disappoint you a paragraph later. Rather than performing some kind of disappearing trick involving glittery capes and awkward banter, Daniels actually just pleaded with the court to let his son off a fraud conviction.

- Ruth Madoff now has to announce any expenditures over $100, which when you’ve been living in a Manhattan penthouse is usually most of them. This constant inconvenience is compounded by exactly the wrong sort of Vanity Fair feature she would want – an in-depth analysis of her history and character by Mark Seal, who has been profiling the Madoffs for the mag and who Ruth apparently hates. It’s all here – the rudeness, the loud voice, the botched surgery. The pre-feminist who books belly-dancers for office parties, the hot-tempered and foul-mouthed party pooper, the “robot” addicted to normality, the MILF, the “fucking social climber”, the woman who was “sort of artificial and frozen—her face, her home.” Ruth claims that many of the depictions of her are inaccurate, but even if you ignore them all the crucial spectre still hangs over her, and it does throughout the article – that she couldn’t have possibly been unaware of the fraud.

Irving “Captain” Picard is the man whose job it is to scrabble around the metaphorical back of Bernie’s sofa to try and find some money to give back – so far he’s found $1bn, so now just has $64bn to go. His next target is Ruth, who he claims, despite her giving back all but $2.5m in assets last month, should pony up $44.8m. He cited the “inequity between Mrs Madoff’s continuing financial advantages and the economic distress of Madoff’s customers”. Hey! This is the woman last seen clipping coupons so she can get a cheap salad for lunch! Not really sure how the maths on this one is going to add up – she’s given back nearly everything she can. Plus the basis of the case on the premise that Ruth had “no good faith basis to believe she was entitled ” to the money her husband was making is shaky at best, considering that in the eyes of the law she wasn’t aware of the fraud. 

In other Madoff ephemera, we get a little glimpse into the rarified, bitchy stratum that Manhattan luxury real estate brokers live in in the New York Observer. Listing the Madoff penthouse is obviously a big prize, but they weren’t happy about the way the selection process was conducted – they all had to wander round it together to check it out, rather than get an individual vetting. “It was a strange and, frankly, slightly insulting way to handle it”, one said. It sounds simply beastly! Put next to the kiddie charities that were left penniless though, and I’m sure the perspective will come raining through. And check this bit of finger-snapping bitchiness from one broker about the state of the place: “So not triple-mint”. Yes, they’re dealing in apartments so plush that just one or two “mints” won’t do.

Madoff himself meanwhile is adapting to prison life well enough – it sounds like he’s been doing some serious reps! “He looked pretty good and seems to be working out.. he looked a lot better than he has in some months since I’ve seen photographs of him”, said Joseph Cotchett, an attorney representing Madoff’s victims who met him in jail. Just can’t shake that image of Madoff doing chin-ups surrounded by respectfully nodding tattooed gang lords. Cotchett also said Madoff, while trying to protect Ruth from the aforementioned nastiness, “doesn’t give a shit” about his sons. Maybe Picard should turn his focus thataway.

One interview saw him crying and threatening to punch the interviewer to the poignant strains of piped Billie Holiday, while another saw him wearing what looked like liquid eyeliner. Papers linking him to a Mexican drug cartel were found in his private jet, he’s not denying suggestions that he worked for the CIA, and bathroom tiles appeared with his face on. It’s like Geoffrey Boycott’s most troubled fever dreams made manifest.

And now it’s getting krazier! After much dilly-dallying Stanford was finally indicted, and subsequently refused bail – he could be in jail for as long as a year before his trial. As the court gets its shit together, court documents are being filed, and some reveal that Stanford courted the Libyan government for investment! And that they went for it, giving him at least $500m!

Stanford went to Tripoli in January this year for a couple of days, to meet the CEO of the Libyan Investment Authority; this followed meetings with Abdulhafid Zlitni, secretary of planning in the Libyan government, last October. The form of the investment isn’t known, but if they put it in Stanford International Bank, the bank at the centre of the fraud allegations, then they can expect to get back “cents in the dollar”, if they’re lucky.

Start sharpening those conspiracy theories. I know Libya’s getting all legit recently, with their burgeoning tourist industry and only halfway provocative meetings with former enemies, but their legacy as anti-American terrorists who tried to kill Marty McFly still weighs heavy in the mind. Stanford? CIA? Libya? Investment? Fraud? Bathroom tiles? Let’s link it all up and say that Stanford was paid by the CIA to extract money from Libya and then flush it away, thereby preventing its rise from anything but a disenfranchised, boycott-ridden Islamic state. I’ve said it, now run with it, internet crazies!

Things started to look up for Ruth a couple of weeks ago, when it emerged that a trust originally formed by her late parents was being “looked after” by Bernie; the feds realised that she wouldn’t put her own money into a fraudulent scheme. She’ll be still watching her back though – the WSJ notes: “the agreement didn’t preclude future criminal charges or lawsuits by the Securities and Exchange Commission or attorney Irving Picard, the trustee of the defunct Madoff firm who is recovering assets for investors”. No doubt some wronged investors will try and come after her last $2.5m. Plus there’s the slightly damaging fact that she shifted millions from one account to another, and had jewellery sent to relatives, just before the news broke.

Those who lost money to Madoff can take heart from the news that $231m has so far been freed up to pay them back – under U.S. law, each victim can receive up to $500,000 from the Securities Investor Protection Corporation. Of course, this falls rather short of the nearly $3bn-worth of complaints filed resulting from the fraud; an additional $2.7bn has been “authorized for potential future recovery”, but that’s only going to materialise if Madoff’s assets can be somehow discovered and mopped up.

We’ll have to wait and see if Madoff’s sons get off as lightly as their mother – they’ve had some actual lawsuits filed against them for a start, and were employees of their father. They did call the FBI though when their pops tearfully confessed that everything was a sham; depending on your love of conspiracy theories, you could surmise that Bernie orchestrated his demise thus so as to make his sons appear innocent. Or, y’know, they could just be innocent. Let’s let the Feds decide.

It’s surprising that it’s taken this long, considering lawsuits have been brought against other people close to Madoff, like Ezra Merkin, as well as other channellers of people’s money, like Fairfield Greenwich. But none get as close as Cohmad, who operated in the next office to Madoff and was partly owned by him. Maurice and Marcia Cohn, the father and daughter team who ran the company, were either very stupid, or very willing to look the other way. Robert Jaffe, who ran Cohmad’s Boston operation, has had the writing on the wall for some time – you may remember he was almost lynched by a gang of irate Floridian Jews just after the Madoff story broke, and had to be rescued by Donald Trump.

Also getting a civil suit filed against them is Stanley Chais, who looks like Magnum PI leading Friday prayers – he’s another guy who fed funds of others into Madoff’s coffers, bagging $546m in profits and $270m in fees. Like the Cohn’s, he’s either thick or involved – Madoff didn’t report a single loss during thousands of stock trades using Chais’s investments, of which Chais either thought “Wow, what a clever man!” or “I don’t care, just as long as I’m getting paid”. While Chais’s attorney said that he lost “virtually everything” to Madoff, the SEC claim that the whole thing was profitable for him. Chais’s clients include Eric Roth, who wrote films like Ali, Forrest Gump and, er, The Postman. Did someone say “karma”?

Give it some time, but we can expect criminal proceedings to be brought against some of these folks at some point. The feds are currently leaning on Frank DiPascali, Madoff’s “ninja” deputy, to extract names and information about the operation, before swinging in and rounding everyone up. Piecing together the evidence is turning into a massive ballache, what with some of the records needing to be digitised from microfilm. Madoff’s propensity for filing non-electronic records can’t be helping either.

Meanwhile the Madoff sentencing season is beginning in earnest – check this pretty-hard-to-stomach interview by Fox News with Claudine de la Villehuchet, widow of Rene, who killed himself after realising he’d lost millions of dollars of others people’s money by investing it with Madoff. She describes Madoff as a “psychopath” and a “murderer”. Those who enjoy nauseating invasions of people’s emotional privacy by interviewers acting like cut-price psychotherapists will find much to like.

So first of all there’s Julian Tzolov, a New York-based Credit Suisse broker who last year put $1bn of investors’ money into risky mortgage-backed securities instead of the federally-backed student loans he said he was putting it into. Tzolov resigned from the bank and quietly went back to his native Bulgaria as the wheels fell off, but when he was charged he dutifully came back Stateside. He was put under house arrest and electronically tagged as part of his bail, but maybe some Fed forgot to put some fresh batteries in, because Tzolov managed to sneak off undetected. He was declared a fugitive last Friday. It’s international manhunt time!

Since then the friends who posted their homes as collateral for his $3m bail have seen them get seized by the authorities. “Everything should be forfeited… They’re going to lose everything”, said ruthless judge Jack Weinstein. Doesn’t look like they’ll be sending Julian a Christmas card this year.

The feds looking for him should be heartened by a piece on Bloomberg, which is one of those WTF off-the-leash things they occasionally run. Entitled “White-Collar Fugitives Foiled by Bad Plans, Weakness”, they interview Dog The Bounty Hunter for his wisdom on fugitives: “a white-collar criminal has never seen the dark side, so when he enters that realm, he is lost”. Meanwhile Donald Davidoff, a Harvard neuropsychologist, said that white collar crims are narcissists who, once they realise that their status has dried up with their new life as a fugitive, often turn themselves in. To be fair, this Tzolov fellow looks like he’s in it for the long haul though. Plus that bald pate is perfect for wig attachment.

Credit Suisse also had to enter into a settlement yesterday with the receiver of Lancer Group, a fraudulent hedge fund that falsely inflated the value of its assets, according to FIN Alternatives. The receiver, Marty Steinberg, accused Credit Suisse of facilitating the fraud and sued them for nearly a million bucks, which a judge overruled, but allowed Marty to refile the claim; Credit Suisse went from saying they’d defend the charges to rolling over and paying Steinberg the arbitrary-seeming sum of $320,550.63. Still, they haven’t come out of it as badly as Lancer themselves – founder Michael Lauer was fined $62m and faces criminal charges, as do four other employees.

But Credit Suisse’s woes continue as they’re still trying to claw back money from loans they made to a range of luxury ski resorts that went bankrupt, loans that in one case had their terms decided on the flip of a coin. They also issued loans to people who couldn’t possibly pay everything back, and just raked in the fees; the judge described their actions as “naked greed”. Well, it’s come back to haunt them, as they’re likely to only make 25 cents in the dollar back on a $375m loan to the Yellowstone Club that went south, plus likely complete losses on a $310m and $250m loan for other ski resorts. This week private equity group CrossHarbor finally took the Yellowstone Club over after months of protest from Credit Suisse.

A company that hires fraudulent brokers, facilitates fraudulent hedge funds, and deals in rapacious loans? Someone start the PR-gloss machine, and quick!

Yes, for his 59th birthday Marc Dreier got what every near-sexegenarian wants, a night out of jail. But after pleading guilty to a $400m fraud yesterday, his freedom is going to be short-lived; everything’s currently pointing to him getting life. He’s already under house arrest, with electronic tags and armed guards. Maybe one dressed up as a clown to make the day extra-special.

Dreier’s fraud involved selling fictitious securities to hedge funds and individuals, some or all of whom were idiots: “at least one of the individual investors gave Dreier’s company $1 million without understanding the nature of the financial transaction”, according to the assistant attorney. Dreier then laundered the money through his law firm, and spent it on boats, beach houses, and all the usual conspicuous consumption trappings. ”I understood everything I was doing was illegal”, he said yesterday. 

He seems like a pretty rubbish fraudster. He did follow golden rule #1 of persuading people to part with their money, namely throwing parties with celebrities – it’s what Madoff, Nami, and countless other recent fraudsters have done to look legit. But then it looks like he just got the money and spent it, rather than starting to pay off his old investors with the money from newer clients, in the time-honoured Ponzi fashion. As well as the vanilla car/house/boat spending trajectory, he also went for some rather more fruity expenditure, like regular nights with prossies bought from frightening-looking Hollywood madam Jody “Babydol” Gibson (who, weirdly, is set to testify in the Phil Spector murder trial soon), and a piece of video art featuring Salma Hayek blaring from his wall. Apparently the calibre of whore wasn’t too good: “I was embarrassed for who he brought with him. I mean, she’s beautiful and tall and skinny, but stupid, just stupid. It was a little bit disappointing, frankly”, said one of his old friends.

There’s also a Hollywood-ready father-son story here too. Dreier wanted his son Spencer to spend some time with him over the summer, but instead of forging a bond through shared interests and mild banter, Dreier went down the classic bad parenting path of bribery – he offered his son $12.5m-worth of property to get him to tag along. “Fine, jeez”, was the alleged response. But this cynical parenting style reaped dividends, as when the Feds came knocking, Dreier Jr. was destroying his dad’s SIM cards, transferring property and keeping his yachts out of American waters. Attaboy! But now Dreier Sr. is undoing all that valuable bonding – he’s paying his food bills with his son’s bar mitzvah money. That kid is going to need so much therapy.

Pang is a Taiwanese immigrant who claimed to have a degree and an MBA from the University of California, Irvine, when he actually had neither. In the mid-90s, he stole $3m from a investment fund he was working at because he “needed the money”. There’s a dispute over whether or not he was subsequently fired from the firm, but I can’t imagine he left with a nice fruit basket, and anyway, Pang’s got much bigger fish to deal with yet.

He later formed PEMGroup, raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Taiwanese banks, to invest in the debt of US companies. It looks like 16,000 investors, with $700m of investment, are affected by the alleged subsequent fraud committed with this money. Allegations about his time there include spunking $15m of funds that were meant to be invested in timeshare properties on a Gulfstream jet; making whoopee with Taiwanese whores; having a gambling addiction that subsequently resulted in “tough-looking men” dropping by to see him; buying fake asset-insurance; and literally showering female colleagues with money won at Vegas.

PEMGroup also bought up life insurance policies off old people, and collected them when they died (mmm, charming). Unfortunately “everybody lived a long time”, so they weren’t getting any payouts. They started to pay investors with the investments of new clients, i.e. a Ponzi scheme. The second-in-command, Nasar Aboubakare, was told of the scheme, and he subsequently told the Wall Street Journal. Between then and the story being published though, he allegedly offered Aboubakare $500,000 to tell the Journal it was all made up and sorry, he was just a bit mental. He forwarded that offer onto the Journal too.

Moreover, in the period just after he was fired, Pang’s wife was murdered by an “elegantly dressed man carrying a briefcase and holding a gun”. The WSJ goes into full-on Philip Marlowe chin-stroking mode over the case, pointing out that Pang had been abusive in the past, that the day before her murder she’d gone to a private investigator with allegations that Pang had been seen with another woman. She was a stripper as well by the way, just to enhance the country-music/spy-novel nature of this narrative. Pang refused to testify in the case, and many of the jurors apparently thought he’d done it rather than the man they eventually acquitted; Pang since tried, in a neatly microcosmic version of his bigger fraudulent business, to defraud his stepson out of the life insurance.

Pang was on a “religious pilgrimage” in China when the news hit – he hired PR pitbull Mike Sitrick, who has represented Halle Berry, Paris Hilton and Naomi Campbell, to blanket deny everything, and then hired David Schindler to defend him against the FBI charges. Schindler was careful to point out that the charges had nothing to do with the alleged fraud, though I think they might be just getting to that a bit later, Dave. Good turd-polishing though!

Three cheers for Mark Maremont at the Wall Street Journal, who dug most of this stuff up, after the tipoff from Aboubakare. So will Pang be able to talk his way out of this one? How many more Ponzi schemes will there be before the recession is done? Will SEC staff ever get a holiday again? Keep watching to find out.

Like the hugely popular fantasy game World of Warcraft, Eve Online is an online multiplayer game set in a “persistent world”–action doesn’t stop when you quit. Serious gamers play for in excess of 30 hours a week, and thousands of pounds sterling can be won and lost during the game’s frequently dramatic and totally unpredictable course. In this sci-fi world players trade, fight, mine, build, and explore. Gamers spend real dollars on cards that pay for game-time, then trading these cards for in-game currency, creating an exchange between real and ingame currency. “Corporations,” groups of players, control and fight over sections of the huge galaxy, giving the game a loose thread and objective.

Only last week a rogue agent tore apart one of the most powerful corporations in an elaborate plot to which game-developers provided nothing except the architecture. And an 80bn ISK embezzlement by online investment banker “Xabier” is the latest in a series of high-profile events to hit the online community (ISK being the in game currency, not the beleagured Icelandic Krona). An amount totalling a few thousands pounds was taken by a player placed in charge of a large amount of currency in their position within on of Eve Online’s banks. It goes far beyond an act of smart-theivery: gameplay on Eve Online forces players like the chairman of the bank in question to issue statements calming investors, trying to avoid a run on the bank getting any worse, promising that “Dynasty Banking will get over these times and we will continue to strive to earn the public’s faith as one of the leading banks of Eve Online.”

With so little regulation, and massive frauds, this parable for the financial crisis is close enough before you consider the nationality of the game’s directors: Icelandic. Both the Icelandic banking and gaming industries like their games played with as little regulation as possible. Worldwide recession continues to hit online games’ profitability with the collapse of Iceland’s banking system and currency restrictions threatening Eve Online’s business model, tempting them to relocate to safer harbours, whilst at their customers thrive on the authenticity of their in-game economy — doesn’t sound very escapist, does it?

Whilst the game has weathered losses ten-times greater in the past – amounts somewhere in the region of $25k-$100k – talk of bank liquidity and the potential of a bank being bailed-out by their in-game competitors, mark Eve Online’s system as a little friendly. Despite the intense rivalry and double crossing between in-game corporations, players have invested a little more than cash into this game – their time and their lives. None of them want a whole universe fail because of a few greedy bankers, even if the game increasingly plays like the real world writ-galactic.

75-year-old Nami is the head of L&G, a company that makes bedding and healthcare products, and him and his executives (21 of whom have also been arrested) promised returns of 9% every three months for every 1m yen invested. “Inventor Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times and was accused of being a con man”, was one of his favourite lines to attract wary investors, which is a rather ballsy strategy if you ask me. But to continue Nami’s simile, some must have thought that he’d produce a lightbulb eventually, and at least 37,000 people hopped on board. 

Of course, as the previous quote proves, some bozos will sign up to anything no matter how dubious it sounds, but others will need some convincing. And what’s more convincing that celebrities? Madoff knew it, ensnaring Kevin Bacon in his web of lies and schmoozing at the US Open to lend legitimacy to his operation; Nami put on massive events with big pop stars, thus telling the world that he must be kosher if he could conduct such lavishness. In the very funny words of one conned businesswoman: ”I couldn’t help but trust Nami after seeing with my very own eyes how closely he chatted with the stars.”

Also reeling in the suckers was Enten, Nami’s virtual currency named by blending “yen” with the word for “heaven”, and described with typical snake-oil banter as “money that doesn’t decrease even when you spend it”. You got a wodge of it depending on the size of your investment, and it could be used online to buy mostly L&G-made commodities; Nami said that the currency would become legal tender at some point, adding: “I will start shining and become world famous. I will certainly move the world”. Unfortunately, when the wheels started to fall of the scheme, Nami tried to pay investors just in Enten, which was useless unless you wanted to subsist off bedding and luxury furniture. The company filed for bankruptcy back in 2007, but is suspected of being effectively bankrupt since 2000.

After a couple of weeks of circulating, the police finally swooped on Nami in rather cinematic circumstances yesterday. Having told reporters that he would be having breakfast at his favourite restaurant the following morning, Nami arrived with a suitcase full of spare underwear and clothes in preparation for his fate. He then sat down for makunouchi bento and some beer, with tens of reporters papping him from outside, before going quietly when the fuzz turned up. Nothing says “I’m screwed” like drinking beer at 5.30am with a suitcase full of pants.

Nami gets indicted tomorrow, presumably in a crisply laundered shirt.

Cosmo was head of Agape World Inc, a bridge-loan company that “works with you and your potential project to help raise assets to meet approval for traditional lending at a later date”. Anything with “later date” in it, especially coming from someone who did jail time for misappropriating funds as a stockbroker, and who has had “extensive gambling therapy”, should start the alarm bells ringing. And bells did ring on this messageboard, where people discuss the flimsiness of Agape, played out over the last few months of delayed loan payments and wheels falling off. After thousands of investors pulled their money out post-crisis, there presumably wasn’t enough to keep the scheme inflated, and so it collapsed.

Cosmo “voluntarily surrendered” to the authorities at the train station, which proves that the train, North By Northwest not withstanding, is not a good getaway method thanks to the waiting around involved. Better yet, the arrest was in Hicksville, NY, which I thought was just shorthand for a town full of tumbleweeds and people with webbed feet, but it turns out it’s an actual place.

Before his arrest, Cosmo told this site that everyone would get their money back, and that he wasn’t running a Ponzi scheme as he’d stopped taking on new investors, which a Ponzi would never do (I’m not really convinced by this logic). He’d already faced the wrath of investor Will Fray, who punched Cosmo at his office last week after it looked like $285,000 of his money was lost with Agape, assured investors all was well, but then quietly locked up the offices.

Meanwhile in the Madoff case, a Spanish law firm representing clients who have lost cash in the scandal is proposing a multi-national network of lawyers to deal with the case and get everyone some compensation. It comes as Spanish bank Santander, who have been doing alright during the crisis through hoovering up smaller beleagured rivals, have revealed their exposure to Madoff comes to €2.33bn. In one of those “oops, the microphone is still on” gaffes, one Santander chief referred to the shareholders gathered beneath him at an emergency meeting about the scam as “bastards”, after they applauded a fellow shareholder who challenged the bank’s dealings with Madoff.

Also, Madoff cheated at golf. That’s all the evidence I need!