Eideard

Uncle Sam could use better debt collectors. Fraudsters, polluters and other corporate and white-collar miscreants owe government agencies more than $65 billion in fines. Only pennies on the dollar are ever paid. With private firms like Contrarian Capital making millions buying claims from creditors, maybe they and the feds should do business.

Some wrongdoers are going to be write-offs from the start. In 2009, a court ordered officers of National Century Financial Enterprises, an Ohio healthcare finance company, to cough up a whopping $2.38 billion for defrauded investors. They’ve paid only about $3.1 million, and with many in prison, there’s little hope for more…

Even with billions at stake during crunching budgetary times, the feds are bad at dunning deadbeats. A just-released study found that courts scatter responsibility for collecting criminal judgments across the nation’s 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices. The result has been a 4 percent payment rate. Other agencies have been similarly inefficient. The chief mining regulator has collected about 5 percent of fines. Customs, about 31 percent…

There may be a better way. Banks and hedge funds make big bucks buying bankruptcy and other claims at a discount and then pursuing debtors for a higher payout. Distressed-asset firms like Contrarian bid for shares of the potential recovery from Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Silver Point Capital and other funds similarly traded in Lehman Brothers bankruptcy claims. Why not federal claims against corporate wrongdoers?

The government still wouldn’t get paid in full. Lehman claims traded recently at 18 to 21 cents on the dollar, and Madoff shares at around 30 cents. But that’s a lot better than 4 percent, and figures are higher for better risks.

Let’s work at getting something back from the creeps who have been stealing from the public pot. It ain’t going to hurt too many friendships at the electoral country club, guys.

Waiting in line to vote

Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, Sudan’s vice president, has said that he accepts the oil-producing south’s split after the first official results showed a 99 per cent vote for independence in a referendum hoping to end a bitter cycle of civil war.

“We announce our agreement and our acceptance of the result of the referendum announced yesterday.

“We wish our brothers in the south good luck and a fruitful future in organising the issues surrounding the new country.” said Taha on Monday.

The comments end speculation that hard-line elements in the Khartoum government would delay recognition of the referendum to garner leverage ahead of talks on how to divide the country’s assets and liabilities.

Taha negotiated the 2005 accord with southern rebel leader John Garang who died three weeks after taking office in the coalition government formed under the deal.

The south is now looking to the international community to recognise its independence, which will likely happen once the final results are confirmed next month…

“The vote for separation was 99.57 per cent,” Chan Reek Madut, the deputy head of the commission organising the vote, told cheering crowds on Sunday in the first official announcement of preliminary results…

Madut said voter turnout in the south was also 99 per cent. He said more than 60 per cent of eligible voters turned out in the country’s north, 58 per cent of whom voted for secession.

Bravo. Decades overdue.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Calling the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico the “greatest environmental disaster of its kind,” President Barack Obama vowed to prosecute those responsible.

“If our laws were broken, leading to this death and destruction, my solemn pledge is that we will bring those responsible to justice ,” Obama said.

The president delivered those words as Attorney General Eric Holder announced a federal investigation into whether criminal or civil laws were violated in connection with the spill…

Holder last month dispatched Justice Department lawyers to the spill region to explore whether laws had been broken. Investigators have directed BP and other companies to preserve documents related to the disaster. Although government officials would not say who was being targeted in the criminal investigation, the probe could center on actions by well owner BP and rig owner Transocean…

And no one mentions Halliburton. They were performing the cementing prior to turning the well over to production. They were the outfit performing the same function on the drilling platform that exploded into fire in similar fashion off the coast of Australia, last year.

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State auditors have uncovered as much as $2 million in questionable spending by the California Avocado Commission.

During a three-year period examined by auditors, employees of the commission — based in Irvine, Calif. — used official credit cards to pay for more than $1.5 million in home remodeling, sports tickets, health club memberships and delivery of restaurant meals…The commission’s 18 employees also ran up charges for $850 hotel rooms at resorts and apparel from high-end retailers including Nordstrom, Talbots and Ann Taylor that was characterized in expense reports as uniforms.

Commission board members, along with family members, guests and employees received “massages, nail service, facials and body treatments” during meetings at luxury resorts, the auditors found.

The auditors concluded there had been “a significant amount of discretionary expenses that appeared questionable at best and even personal at times.” The items and services “may be considered gifts of public funds,” the auditors’ report said.

Commission board Chairman Rick Shade said some of the auditor’s criticism was unwarranted.

“I don’t feel it was all that lavish,” he told the L.A.Times, “but I agree that certain areas had problems.”

We should all have problems like that. Right?

The Brazilian government said its anti-slavery taskforce, a roaming unit designed to crack down on modern-day slavery, had freed 4,634 workers from slave-like conditions in 2008. The taskforce, which often works with armed members of the federal police, said it had undertaken 133 missions and visited 255 different farms in 2008. The ministry said former slaves had been paid £2.4m in compensation.

“It is a very sad situation that leaves you feeling impotent. The federal government has acted – but having slave labour in a country where the wealth is so evident is a very painful contradiction,” said Leonardo Sakamoto, who is a member of Brazil’s National Commission for the Eradication of Slave Labour and runs the NGO Repórter Brasil.

Many of Brazil’s slave workers come from the impoverished backlands of north-eastern Brazil, where unemployment is high. Rounded up by middlemen who promise them employment, the workers are packed on to coaches and taken to remote farms, often in the Amazon or Brazil’s midwest.

Once there, the slaves are put to work producing charcoal, cutting sugar cane or clearing tracts of Amazon rainforest for cattle ranchers. Housed in isolated and often squalid jungle camps, they are forced to work until they have paid off debts for food, medicine and housing. Many lose contact with their families.

Activists claim that ranchers in the Amazon often employ small armies of gunmen to stop workers fleeing.

Like any major crime in any country, you don’t get away with slavery without the collusion of politicians. Elected, appointed, I don’t care what. They must be removed from power.