Wall Street Folly

• Citi reshuffle to usher in more turmoil
• Geithner Seeks ‘Difficult-to-Evade’ Derivatives Laws
• El-Erian Says Geithner Shares an ’A’ With Bernanke for Effort
• Roubini Sees Six More Months of Recession, ‘Shallow’ Recovery
• Few Economists Favor More Stimulus Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Citigroup, Derivatives, Economy, Mohamed El-Erian, Nouriel Roubini, Pimco, Ross Mandell, Sky Capital, Tim Geithner, U.S. Treasury

Here’s the press release detailing the SEC boiler room charges against Sky Capital CEO Ross Mandell, COO Stephen Shea and four registered reps: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Boiler rooms, FBI, fraud, Legal, Ross Mandell, SEC, Sky Capital

Two and a half years after the FBI paid Sky Capital’s offices a visit , six connected to the firm have been arrested in what Bloomberg describes as a 10 year $100 million fraud.  It’s not clear whether the first visit was related to the current charges.

Details so far are sketchy.  We wonder if the SEC was also involved, or if this is another case where they slept as another agency did their work.

Update: Looks like the SEC was involved and that it was connected to the FBI raid in 2006: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: arrests, FBI, fraud, SEC, Sky Capital

New York broker Sky Capital, headed by Ross Mandell — an admitted former Wall Street bad boy — received a visit from the FBI on Monday, where they raided the firm and confiscated boxes of records.  According to a Dow Jones Newswires article appearing in the New York Sun this morning, it’s not completely clear what the FBI was after:

FBI special agents executed a search warrant at Sky and left with boxes of documents, according to a person familiar with the matter. The probe appears related to shares offerings to foreign investors. A spokeswoman for the District Court for the Southern District of New York declined to comment, citing a policy of not discussing the possibility of an investigation. Sky Capital LLC is a subsidiary of Sky Capital Holdings Ltd., which is also the parent company of Sky Capital UK Ltd., a British firm.

But founder Ross Mandell is a guy with an interesting past from what we can tell after we did a bit of poking around.  All of the excesses of the 80’s and 90’s.  Sex. Drugs. Alcohol.  And run-ins with the NASD. He was interviewed by Pranay Gupte in 2005 in an article that appeared in the New York Sun where Mandell talked about all of his excesses and how he became a changed man:

Ross Mandell, founder and CEO of Sky Capital Holdings, fervently believes in redemption, rehabilitation and renewal.

"I was one of the bad boys of Wall Street," he said over lunch. "I was an alcoholic. I lived hard and played hard. I used drugs. I treated my friends, business associates and clients quite badly."

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: FBI, Legal, Lifestyle, Ross Mandell, SEC, Sky Capital