December 17th, 2015
Next up in the Shkreli case…

…his noble defense lawyer.

Baruch Weiss’s “purpose in life is to undo injustice … [T]here is something almost superhuman” about [his] drive to do the right thing.”

Weiss worked unceasingly for another persecuted martyr, Sholom Rubashkin, and UD feels sure he will offer the same moral indignation at injustice to Martin Shkreli.

December 17th, 2015
The beauty of hedge fund capitalism…

… is that if any particular hedgie pisses you off, for any reason at all, you stand a fair chance of nailing him on securities fraud. That’s why if you’re a hedgie you should keep your head down and not piss too many people off the way Martin Shkreli did with that price hike on that drug. Because all the annoyed SEC had to do was run its eyes lightly over his financial past in order to arrest him, just now, at his New York digs.

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It wouldn’t be University Diaries without anagrams. Try your hand. Here are my first attempts. I imagine it as an abbreviated conversation between an onlooker and Shkreli as he’s loaded into the police van.

[M A R T I N S H K R E L I]


HI MISTER! LARKN’?

“I LIKEST HARRMIN’ … TRASH ‘N MILK ‘ER …”

M SHRIEK’N ‘TRIAL’

“MA! TELL R SHRINK!”

December 8th, 2015
Ira Rennert, the genius behind Yeshiva University’s Rennert Entrepreneurial Institute…

… reveals the key to a successful business career: Spend your entire life in courtrooms. You’ll loot your businesses, of course; that’s how you make big money. And individuals, workers, the government, what have you, will sue you. They will sue you again and again.

And they will win, because after all you do seem to loot or defraud or whatever your businesses. And you’ll have to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and compensation.

But do not worry, because

1. you’ve got plenty of money left over after you pay out the judgements; and
2. you don’t give a shit about bad publicity.

That’s it, kiddies! The business philosophy of your benefactor. Inspirational.

November 7th, 2015
Kellogg’s Serial …

… cheaters.

Beware the B-School Boys.

November 5th, 2015
Edward L. Queen has a nice Jeff Bridges vibe…

going, plus his recent New Republic piece is a more than worthy addition to one of UD‘s most popular categories, Beware the B-School Boys. Gets a bit preachy at the end (“When a person’s worth is determined only by money, only by success as it is and can be monetized, when one has no sense of being without the BMW, the Rolex, the Armani suits, the yacht, etc, the moral flabbiness emerges. Indeed, it engulfs entire organizations and perhaps even entire societies.”), but one does tend to zoom out in one’s final paragraph…

[The idea that] the only duty of a corporation is return on investment [has now been] drilled into generations of business school graduates… [Further,] evidence suggests that not only are business students more impaired in their moral judgments in a broader sense than are those in other majors and professional schools, but that business schools themselves may be responsible.

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SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL: UD has long argued that this would be a wonderful new motto for Wharton.

August 27th, 2015
“We’re great football players, but we’re shit people.”

The soaring oratory of Maurice Clarett. As UD readers know, UD has long recommended exactly the same thing for the B-School Boys (see her ever-popular category Beware the B-School Boys) — charismatic ex-cons drawn from the same crowd as their audience. Andy “Enron” Fastow is one example, but America’s prisons are packed with ciceronian swindlers.

Together, these two lad-categories (football hero/captain of industry) make up much of our national mythology, and therefore America’s institutions continue to deal gently with them, which is why remarkable numbers of them keep raping women and financial systems.

UD is a big believer in the power of testifying. She thinks Business Ethics courses are bullshit, but she thinks Madoff on the hustings would be marv.

August 13th, 2015
‘”When I first met people at HBS and they had worked in a bank, I would pick up on them feeling like they were almost ashamed,” Gandhi said.’

Ashamed? Ashamed? ASHAMED???

 

(Say it out loud like Bracknell saying A HANDBAG???)

What is happening to this country? People at Harvard Business School are ashamed to admit they were like this with great Americans like Lloyd Blankfein, Squido di Tutti Squidi? This country is about to elect as President a proud graduate of Wharton, the BIZnessest biz school in the world, and current students at HBS are ashamed of having worked in an investment bank? What the hell is that? Can it be that the, uh, symbolic value of people Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, and pretty boy Dick Fuld and his merry men is declining?

It’s partly the fault of those goddamn case studies.

“There are several case studies dealing with investment banks wherein students discuss the brutal work environment and incredibly out-of-whack work-life balance,” [said one observer]. “The banks’ efforts — their success or lack thereof — to bring about change have not been discussed, but what is consistently highlighted is the dark side of investment banks.”

What to do?

Big banks are fighting back, promising recruits more hours to sleep, the occasional day off and reasonable deadlines. The effort, prompted by the death of a Bank of America Corp. intern in 2013, is driven in part by fear that the brightest students no longer see investment banking as a sustainable career. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. invited celebrity author Deepak Chopra to talk to its staff a few months ago about wellness, relaxation and the value of vacation.

Deepak! Deepak baby! Teach them how not to die!

July 30th, 2015
I’m sure the rest of their global operations are just fine.

Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, which was fined a record 3 billion yuan ($483 million) for corruption in China last year and is examining possible staff misconduct elsewhere, faces new allegations of bribery in Romania.

…The company is already probing alleged bribery in Poland, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

Sepp Blatter’s coming in to clean up the mess.

*********************

How do all the Glaxo Professors of this and that in med schools all over America and England feel about having their name cheek by jowl with this company?

UD‘s confident they don’t give a shit.

June 9th, 2015
“You don’t have to be a megalomaniac to prefer quantity of attention over quality of attention, as the Wharton-educated Trump would probably tell you if he were to allow himself a reflective moment.”

If UD had never started this blog, she would never have come to know the Wharton School, one of America’s most curious institutions. Though Donald Trump is by far its highest-profile graduate, Wharton (as you know if you read this blog) is the dominant source for this country’s insider traders in particular and fraudsters in general.

B-School boys do dither on a regular basis about the amorality many of their schools champion – I mean, as regular as each breaking story about another Raj Rajaratnam… Some of these guys even notice that a major function of schools like Wharton is to bring conspirators together. Guys who as lads were maladjusted malefactors find at Wharton (type WHARTON in my search engine for all of my posts about the school) a warm inviting community of people just like themselves with whom to mastermind billion-dollar larcenies. When the Justice Department starts saying unkind things about one or another Wharton grad, their school buddies come out with eloquent character references.

******************

Still, how unfair to say Donald Trump isn’t reflective! He founded a university.

May 20th, 2015
“They met while business students at the University of Texas at Dallas …”

The breastaurant entrepreneur course of study:

Breastness Analytics

The Ebreastive Leader

Breastness & Society

Managing Complex Breasts

Breastal Strategy

Breast-Based Marketing

Management of Breasts

The Silicone Experience

Global Strategy

Inbreastments

Penetration Testing

TIT Project Management

May 4th, 2015
Thinking Like a Business School

The former dean of George Washington University’s business school massively overspent, leaving the school with a $13 million deficit. How to repay it?

Robert Van Order, the chair of the school’s finance department, said the about 60 faculty members at the meeting discussed where the burden should fall. Some faculty thought the University should forgive the $13 million budget deficit altogether because it was incurred two years ago.

Yeah, screw it. Ancient history!

May 2nd, 2015
“Computer Science and Engineering Professor Jun-Hong Cui, a former assistant dean for graduate studies and diversity, and Professor Zhijie Shi, requested approval of those purchases. But they also are two principals of Aquatic Sensor Network Technology, according to the auditors.”

Sure, Beware the B-School Boys; but as UD has often noted on this blog, your engineering school features a scam so smooth, so consistent, so reliable, that it’s positively… engineered.

You know the ol’ diddle me once routine; yet virtually every university equipped with engineering professors seems eager to be taken again and again by the time-honored get-rich-off-your-grant-by-setting-up-a-business-and-shunting-the-grant-funds-to-it. U Conn even let Cui and Shi (apparently there are yet more professors in their department who will be named; similar last names to Cui and Shi will almost certainly mean a UD limerick) start their business on campus, giving them all sorts of university perks and inducements to do so. The guys and gals then turned around and allegedly stole NSF grant money – large quantities of it – by having that money go to their company.

Not only were the purchases initiated by UConn faculty “who had a significant interest in AquaSeNT,” but two of the purchase requisitions they signed indicated, “I have no financial or other beneficial interest in the vendor,” the auditors wrote.

OTOH, there’s a simple explanation here. The guys and gals say they didn’t read the conflict of interest language in the grant before signing off on it. I mean, if they’d known… (You will know this as the George Costanza Move.) Plus they were pressed for time and all.

U Conn’s in deep doodoo too, because they didn’t inform the State Auditors office of the NSF investigation. I guess U Conn’s been pressed for time as well.

April 10th, 2015
Beware, as always, the B-School Boys.

And this one’s at already incredibly notorious Florida State University, run by a know-nothing politician, recent haunt of Jameis Winston, etc., etc., etc., etc. (For etc., etc., etc., etc., put Florida State University in my search engine.)

A federal grand jury handed down an indictment on embezzlement charges for former Florida State University finance professor James S. Doran on Thursday.

The indictment claims that between May 2010 and March 2011, 39-year-old Doran embezzled more than $650,000 in funds held by FSU while he was an assistant professor.

Says, somewhat mysteriously, he “embezzled FSU property valued at more than $5,000.” Given that he oversaw a student-run investment fund, UD‘s wondering if he pinched some of that, and/or helped himself to the classic objets of professor-desir (computers, cameras, anything of value that can be moved).

February 16th, 2015
Fond as we are, on this blog, of clerical hypocrites…

… the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green is obviously a major find – a much bigger find, indeed, than University Diaries has ever, uh, found. (A close contender is Monsignor Nunzio “Cinquecento” Scarano, but he didn’t run the bank the way Rev Green did.)

So far this blog has made do with the rad-rectitudinous team of Gordon Gee and Jim Tressel, plus (batting for UD‘s side) Yeshiva University trustees Ezra Merkin and Bernard Madoff. All of these men stand directly in the Elmer Gantry tradition, cloaking themselves in piety while engaging in antics that range from the morally despicable to, well, Madoff.

But Rev Green is made of bigger stuff than this, and he dovetails brilliantly with one of this blog’s most-used categories: Beware the B-School Boys. Banker and priest and tax evasion enabler extraordinaire, Green inspires the Guardian’s editorialists to rhetorical heights.

“Values,” wrote the Rev Prebendary Stephen Green, “go beyond ‘what you can get away with’.” Reassuring words from the part-time priest who for years ran one of the world’s biggest banks, before being brought into government by David Cameron. Courtesy of the HSBC files, however, we now know that this bank, when under his stewardship – first as chief exec, later as chair – was involved in concealing “black” accounts from the taxman, servicing the secretly stowed funds of corrupt businessmen and allowing the withdrawal of “bricks” of untraceable cash.

In the face of these ugly facts about his old bank’s Swiss operation, Lord Green has said only that it is for HSBC, and not for him, to comment on that institution’s past and current behaviour. No wonder. His obvious refuge would be to claim that, as the boss of a global business in London, he had other worries and could not be expected to know every detail of what distant colleagues in Geneva were up to. Sadly for him, this potential shelter took a battering from something else he wrote: “For companies, where does this [ethical] responsibility begin? With their boards, of course. There is no other task they have which is more important. It is their job … to promote and nurture a culture of ethical and purposeful business throughout the organisation.”

You can’t blame HSBC. What better cover for a tax evasion scam than an Anglican clergyman who writes books about morality?

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Green is also “advising the archbishop of Canterbury on how to shake up the Church of England, advocating more vicars in an MBA mould.” Stay tuned!

February 15th, 2015
“[William] Rauwerdink is also on the Dean’s Advisory Board at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business, where his biography on the university website does not include his stint at Lason or his convictions.”

Google the guy’s name and move down four — four — places on the list you get, and his massive fraud, his “greed and avarice” (according to the judge who put him away), his history of insider trading and securities fraud, is right there in your face. Again, you don’t even have to scroll down. It’s all in the first four paragraphs. Easy peasy.

So why is Rauwerdink on the Dean’s Advisory Board at the University of Wisconsin Business School? After having his staff ascertain that Bill’s a career fraudster (they can’t have just stuck his name on the list; they must do a tad of research, no?), perhaps Dean François Ortalo-Magné said A bread and butter fraudster is one thing; Rauwerdink’s the real deal. He’s been at it, from an astonishing variety of approaches, for decades. I need his advice.

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