Tag: billionaire

Judge blocks lawsuits against opioid producers to help them save money to pay for lawsuits

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And it goes downhill from there!


Erik McGregor/LightRocket

❝ OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma and its billionaire owners, the Sacklers, on Friday got a temporary reprieve from lingering court battles over their alleged role in fueling the opioid crisis. In exchange, they may have to be more forthcoming about what happened to all the OxyContin money.

❝ US bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain temporarily halted state lawsuits against Purdue as well as the Sacklers — though only Purdue has filed for bankruptcy protections. In pausing the states’ cases, Judge Drain cited Purdue’s mounting legal expenses, which he noted is money that could otherwise go toward addressing the opioid crisis and its victims…

❝ Purdue is estimated to have made more than $35 billion from OxyContin sales, and the Sacklers reportedly siphoned off as much as $13 billion of that into their own pockets.

Out of the kindness of their collective hearts, the Sacklers have in return promised the court they’ll stop hiding the money and even answer questions truthfully. What fracking planet did these greedy bastards grow up on? These are the sort of rules the rest of us are required to live by our whole lives.

The End of Gothamist Is a Terrible Sign for the Future of Local News

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Billionaire Class Scumbag

❝ …While on my lunch break, I lost my job as editor in chief at LAist. I’d just finished a bowl of unmemorable office cafeteria chili and was sitting in the lobby of our WeWork when a coworker in New York sent me a three-word text: “Check your inbox.”…there was just a letter from our billionaire owner Joe Ricketts, informing readers that he had made “the difficult decision” to discontinue publishing DNAinfo and Gothamist, our parent site.

…With what appeared to have been the flip of a switch, 116 journalists had lost their jobs, and LAist had been shuttered—along with our four sister sites in New York, Chicago, D.C., and San Francisco, and the DNAinfo sites in New York and Chicago.

❝ The Gothamist and DNAinfo New York newsrooms had formally voted to unionize a week earlier…

❝ Gothamist, LAist, Chicagoist, DCist and SFist each fulfilled critical roles in their cities. Even as our hometown papers faced cuts and layoffs, we continued to cover local and hyperlocal news, find the relevant takeaways in hours-long public meetings, and strive to relay it all in a tone that was frank, compulsively readable, and often funny…There is a much larger loss here, one that should scare everyone (even those who’ve never read an ist site in their lives). At a time when local journalism is more crucial than ever, the closure of our sites effectively amounts to a silencing. There will now be less information for everyone, in each of those five cities.

This wasn’t a case about money. The creep who owned the sites made money on all five. Already a billionaire, Joe Ricketts plays with your money if you invest with TD Ameritrade. And cavort with his favorite politician – our fake president.

Nope. He doesn’t believe that folks who work for a living have the right to bargain collectively, to negotiate income and working conditions – even though that is a right protected by federal law for decades. He’d rather declare the companies he owns to be unprofitable – and close them down.

Republican hack gets 2 years for directing Super Pac fund$ for candidate

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One of his regular appearances on Fox News

A former Republican political operative was sentenced Friday to two years in prison and another two years of probation in the first criminal case of illegal coordination between a campaign and a purportedly independent political ally.

The reason for “former”, of course, is that he got caught.

Tyler Harber, convicted in February, told the court he knew he was guilty when he created and helped arrange for the super Pac National Republican Victory Fund to buy $325,000 in ads to help Republican Chris Perkins’ 2012 House campaign. He received $9,100 for setting up the deal. He had pleaded guilty to one count of coordinated federal election contributions and one count of making false statements to the FBI…

Prosecutors said he used an alias and other means to deflect inquiries by a political party official. He also admitted that he told multiple lies when interviewed by the FBI.

Federal prosecutor said Harber’s guilty plea and sentencing was “an important step forward in the criminal enforcement of federal campaign finance laws.”

It’s also the only conviction for a crime as common as white bread. The laws were re-written by rightwing flunkies on the Supreme Court. Existing standards for the Federal Election Commission are so wimpy as to hardly exist.

Getting rid of the Citizens United decision is one of the many tasks Congressional conservatives consider unimportant. Not that they work very hard at anything an American citizen might consider dutiful.

The response from leading Republicans like, say, Jeb Bush, is a call to set aside that portion of the law that calls for separation from anonymous donors and candidates for elected office.

Tyler Harber’s PAC? The National Republican Party Victory PAC.

Canadians don’t protest Bush visit – most folks ignored him!

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There were no burning effigies, no chanted slogans, and not even a single shoe was thrown.

George W. Bush’s typical welcome wagon was missing in action when the controversial former U.S. president quietly visited Toronto Monday for an unpublicized and private speaking event.

“We had no protests,” confirmed Michael Miller, a spokesman for Northbridge Financial Corp., which jointly presented the event with its parent company, Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd.

Fairfax CEO and Toronto billionaire Prem Watsa sponsored the lunchtime talk and question-and-answer session for more than 200 invited guests at the downtown Hilton…

Watsa had also planned to host a private speaking event with Bush on Tuesday for Tyndale University, a local evangelical Christian college and seminary, but the event was abruptly cancelled last week when opposition within the school’s community quickly mounted and a petition was launched by former students.

Alumni, faculty and students who found Bush’s hawkish legacy out of sync with Tyndale’s Christian teachings celebrated the school’s decision…

Monday’s lunch and talk lasted two hours, during which the folksy former president told jokes, talked about his memoir and the U.S.’s current economic woes. Guests then had the opportunity to have their photo taken with Bush.

I presume the Harper flunkeys in attendance had a decent meal. Otherwise, they paid to spend a few hours listening to a walking example of just how useless and backwards a politician can be elected to head the United States. Perhaps a portent of what people like Watsa hope continues to be the custom in Canada, eh?

Billionaire head of hedge fund arrested for fraud, insider trading

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Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

By all appearances, Raj Rajaratnam was a self-made billionaire, having built Galleon Group into a giant hedge fund with a specialty in technology companies.

But prosecutors said on Friday that he had profited not from his trading genius but from his Rolodex, and they arrested him on charges of conspiracy and securities fraud in what they called the biggest insider trading scheme ever involving a hedge fund.

In all, six people were arrested, accused by prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission of earning more than $20 million from illegal trading in companies like Google, Akamai and Hilton Hotels over nearly three years.

Mr. Rajaratnam is accused of tapping a vast network of informants across a swath of corporate America: a senior official at I.B.M. considered a contender for the top job at that firm; executives of Intel and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company; two former Bear Stearns employees who had moved to a hedge fund, New Castle Partners; and an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service.

While trading secrets, though, one crucial piece of information was not shared — several of the phones were tapped.

The wiretaps were made with the help of an unnamed cooperating witness, a former Galleon employee who was said to ply Mr. Rajaratnam with information originally to land a job. The witness, who began cooperating in November 2007, has agreed to plead guilty in the hopes of receiving a lesser sentence.

“This case should serve as a wake-up call for Wall Street,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference on Friday. He added that the investigation was continuing.

Wake-up call my Sweet Aunt Josephine’s rosy cheeks! RTFA. It’s like cleaning out the White House and leaving behind a thoroughly corrupt Congress.

The SEC was pressed into dumping a few bad apples like Madoff – and now Rajaratnam – who sit in the midst of a network of corruption and deceit that remains without thoroughgoing regulation or oversight.

Crooked financier owes at least $226 million, says the IRS

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Daylife/Reuters Pictures

American financier R. Allen Stanford and his wife owe back taxes, penalties and interest of at least $226.5 million, the IRS said in court documents filed in Dallas, Texas.

The final total could be even higher because the Stanfords have not filed their income tax return for 2007. The IRS says they owe $110 million in back taxes, $55.8 million in penalties and $60.7 million in interest for the 1999 through 2003 tax years.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has said that Stanford was behind “a fraud of shocking magnitude.” FBI agents served Stanford with SEC papers accusing him and three of his companies of orchestrating a $9.2 billion investment fraud scheme.

With the filing, the IRS joins thousands of other creditors in the case who are seeking a crack at Stanford’s remaining assets. The documents were filed in U.S. District Court on Friday, but weren’t released until Monday.

In September, Forbes magazine named Stanford No. 205 in its 400 Richest Americans article, saying he was worth more than $2 billion.

Which goes to prove that biz rags like Forbes are guilty of the same “mark to market” crap accounting that evoked most of the economic crash.