Former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine was exiting the room during a recess in Thursday�s House Financial Services Committee, when a man attempted to serve him with papers on behalf of one of the firm�s former clients.
CNBC cameras captured a man walking up to Corzine as he exited the hearing room and attempting to serve him with a lawsuit. Corzine told the process server to see his lawyer and kept walking as someone in his party bent over to pick up the documents, which had been put on the ground in the former New Jersey senator and governor�s wake. The network�s Kayla Tausche said the suit is on behalf of a customer who had a $95 million MF Global account, filed in the Southern District of New York.
Earlier during Thursday�s hearing, Corzine reiterated that he never authorized the misuse of customer money, never intended to do so and never said anything that could have been misconstrued to those ends.
The testimony comes after CME Group Executive Chairman Terrence Duffy said in a Senate Agriculture Commitee hearing Tuesday that an MF Global employee told CME auditors that Corzine knew about a loan to the brokerage firm�s European subsidiary that came from commingled customer funds. (See �CME Chief Suggests Corzine Knew About Missing Money.�)
In Thursday�s hearing, Corzine said he could not specifically respond to such allegations without understanding their source. Later, once the hearing resumed following the recess, Corzine took umbrage at the conventional wisdom that he was trying to build MF Global into a smaller version of his former company, Goldman Sachs Group. (See �Weekend Reading: The Goldman Saga.�)
There will be no shortage of lawsuits in the wake of MF Global�s collapse, with the firm�s bankruptcy trustee James Giddens having estimated a $1.2 billion shortfall in customer funds. Reuters reported Wednesday that regulators at the CFTC have a sense of all the firm�s transactions and are just sorting out whether anything improper occurred. That was back up for debate Thursday though, after one of the CFTC�s commissioners, Bart Chilton, distanced himself from those claims in a statement that read, in part: �I do not have confidence that we know where all the money went.�
MF Global filed for bankruptcy Oct. 31, after a weekend scramble to sell the business to suitors including Interactive Brokers, fell through largely because a shortfall in customer funds was discovered. (See �Endgame At Hand For MF Global.�)
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