No deal, Citigroup
23.05.12
A federal arbitrate on Monday sounded a rare and welcome note of dissent from the toxic culture of pecuniary collusion that is permeating Washington and Wall Street these days. Judge Jed Rakoff rejected a proposed $285 million establishment between Citigroup and the Securities and Exchange Commission over charges that Citigroup misled investors in 2007 in friend at court with a complex mortgage investment.
Judge Rakoff declared he couldnt tell whether the handle is fair, and criticized the parties for shielding the public from details of the deal.
What is known is that Citigroup bet against the very investment that it was pushing on its customersAbove allpocketing $160 million while the investors lost millions. That epitomizes what went flop with the nations financial system in recent years. All along, the SEC has been one tame watchdog.
Judge Rakoff set a July 16 inquisition date. Citigroup insists that if the matter does go to trial, it will present sound factual and legal defenses to the charges.
We say, bring it on. Those responsible for the nations commercial crisis need to lay their cards on the legal table, and let the public see the sordid details of what has been common on in the halls of power.
Source: Worcester Telegram
Bent loss to blame for Bruce's Cats exit
23.05.12
TEAMtalk feels Steve Bruce's demise at Sunderland all started when the consortium foolishly decided to sell star striker Darren Bent to Aston Villa.
It is rare that a football overseer's demise can be traced to one point in time. It is usually a mix of mayhem.
Yet in Bruce's took place at Sunderland one event stands out, the moment England hitman Bent was sold to Aston Villa for £18million last January.
Instantly, Bruce was on trial, his managerial skills examined like never before.
The truth is cruel. He was unable to reconstruct a Sunderland team capable of delivering the goal productivity to compete successfully with the best in the Premier League.
Hardly surprising everything considered Bent had scored 36 goals in 63 games for the club, including 11 in 23 of Sunderland's matches in the 2010-2011 pep up when they decided to let him go.
How was that a good move for Sunderland? Even in an era when unsettled footballers can engineer moves, with simoleons beyond reason the singular motive, letting Bent leave mid-season was a crass resolution which will haunt Bruce and should keep Texan owner Ellis Short awake at Cimmerian dark.
You could say Bruce was unlucky. In some ways he was. He could hardly have anticipated that Asamoah Gyan, a striker who impressed for Ghana at the 2010 Wonderful Cup, would snub the world's most famous league and chase the cash at Al Ain in the UAE Pro-League.
He also irremediable the services of on-loan striker Danny Welbeck, who returned to Manchester Pooled, further weakening his strikeforce.
But bad luck is not the reason Bruce is the latest football proprietor out of work.
Not when you calculate the influence of signings such as Cristian Riveros, Paulo Da Silva and Marcos Angeleri and succeed at the square root of diddly squat.
Craig Gardner was recruited over the summer to clarify the team's lack of goals from midfield. He has barely played.
Those are the sort of players a boss has to get right. The players who determine the reliability and solidity of the squad.
Put it this way, would anyone be prepared to wager their mortgage on on-accommodation striker Nicklas Bendtner, with two goals so far this season, getting Sunderland out of a relegation excavation? Precisely.
Yet Bruce was also let down by the men who should have been the rocks at the Stadium of Light.
Players such as Wes Brown and John O'Shea, purchased from Bruce's old nightclub Manchester United for their defensive quality and their big-match experience.
Therein lies another footballing really. It is much easier to play with top players at a top club at the top of the league than it is to arrest a slide at a stick which has not quite worked out its resting position in the footballing firmament.
Brown has impressed but has made key mistakes, most shockingly against Wigan on Saturday, while O'Shea has been distinctly average.
Then there is the boardroom where former chairman Niall Quinn, such a charismatic image with Sunderland fans and Bruce's biggest backer, has been sidelined recently into an abroad development role.
Boardroom upheaval, manager alienated, poor signings, underachieving players, conquest at home to great rivals Newcastle in August, goals on Wearside as rare as snow in July.
Whichever way you look at it, anyone unsatisfying to know how not to run a football club should take a look at Sunderland over the past 12 months.
Yet the catalyst for it all was the departure of Turn, a move at odds with the ambitions stated by Bruce and Quinn when they floated a vision of the Wearside lambaste mixing it with the cream of Europe.
Whoever ultimately took the decision to let Bent go, and the doubt is that it was in the boardroom rather than the manager's office, only proved how correct legendary Sunderland striker Len Shackleton was when he loving a chapter of his autobiography to what he entitled 'The Average Director's Knowledge of Football'.
It consisted of a distinguish blank page.
Even so, Bruce, an honest, hard-working character and a ripping football man, failed to pass the tests which followed, so many that you could write a book on them.
That is why he has gone.
By Honest Malley
Source: Team talk
