Are Income Trusts A Ponzi Scheme

One has to worry about Income Trusts in Canada. The reason is that this country has such poor regulations around capital and investments, that it is literally the wild west for all sorts of get rich quick schemes. Bre-X was not an anomaly but business as usual.

Globeinvestor.com: Building Bay St.

The Toronto Stock Exchange was established in 1861, with 24 members (who paid $5 each to belong), trading 18 securities during half-hour daily sessions held at a local Masonic hall. But much of the action shifted to the cross-town Standard Stock and Mining Exchange, which was formed in 1901 and became the North American capital for mining shares and stock swindles. The Financial Post estimated that 400,000 investors were bilked out of $100 million, before the S&M was merged into the slightly more respectable TSE in 1934.

One of Bay Street's first major reforms was a crackdown on wash trading (a practice that created the appearance of activity through the manipulation of fictitious accounts) following the 1964 Windfall Scandal. Viola MacMillan, a doughty prospector, used the technique for fraudulent promotion of Consolidated Golden Arrow Mines. But it was Windfall Mines, another MacMillan company, that triggered the uproar after she drove up the price of its shares from 65 cents to $5.60 without any underlying value in the summer of 1964. She was later sentenced to nine months in jail in connection with Golden Arrow, but served just eight weeks. Windfall wasn't that much of a scandal because so many mine promoters followed her example, but the royal commission formed to investigate the case nevertheless recommended trading reforms. MacMillan died in 1993 at 90, fully pardoned and the holder of an Order of Canada. (Lenny Gaudet, please copy.)

Corporate crime in Canada is big business,it is actually business as usual, and it has had historic international or at least cross border connections with the United States.

Al Capone operated out of Moosejaw, the Bronfmans supplied Capone with booze and then operated on their own. Capone was indicted for income tax evasion, the Bronfmans are corporate big wigs in the international Entertainment business.

Corprate crime in Canada is still all wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And while corporate crime is big in Canada, in fact it is a major export, such as the boiler room swindle of British MP and author Jeffery Archer. The Canadain legal system is like Siberia when it comes to dealing with it, out in the cold and in the dark.

Welcome to the world of white-collar crime. It's always been there, but perhaps you didn't notice. A lot of criminologists like to refer to 1940 as the year when criminology first noticed, when Edwin Sutherland drew attention to it, and defined it as "crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation." Sutherland's (1949) pioneering study of legal action against the seventy largest U.S. corporations found that all seventy firms in the sample had at least one formal action against them, and that the average number of violations per company was fourteen. A full 60% of the firms had been convicted in criminal court. Goff & Reasons (1978) found similar white collar crime patterns in Canada, and Clinard & Yeager (1980) found that nearly two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies come under fire at least once a year for federal regulatory violations and/or violations of corporate/criminal law.

WHITE-COLLAR AND CORPORATE CRIME OVERLOOKED

While over one-million charges were laid against street criminals in 1988, only 23 were laid against corporations in the first two years of the 1986 Competition Act. According to Holmes, the lenient treatment of non-violent crime has led to the growth of a "get-something-for-nothing attitude." Similarly, many corporations view the penalties for corporate crime as a Òmere cost of doing business."

Judges require better corporate crime education: Judicial training has historically keyed on blue-collar wrongdoing

Securities regulators should place greater emphasis on restitution for aggrieved investors and Canada should create specialized criminal courts specifically for white-collar crimes, according to a York-authored study cited in the National Post June 15. 2005

Not surprisingly, said the Post, her paper also reiterated the widely held view that when compared with their US counterparts, Canadian regulators do not engage in enough enforcement activity and are less effective when they do. To support her assertion, Puri cited statistics that showed Canadian securities regulators devote a smaller percentage of their total budget to enforcement than their US counterparts. As well, Puri found financial penalties are 10 times higher in the United States than the average Canadian fine.

Corporate and white-collar crime is not victimless. The harms caused by corporate misconduct can result in substantial injury to a broad range of stakeholders, as witnessed by recent accounting and corporate governance scandals at Enron and Worldcom. Shareholders can lose their retirement savings, employees their jobs, and creditors significant investments. Ernst & Young fraud investigator Don Holmes estimates that white-collar crime costs Canadians $20-billion a year. The Canadian judiciary needs to recognize not only the magnitude and impact of corporate misconduct on large segments of the population, but also the broader ramifications of corporate crime on the Canadian economy.

The judiciary has historically treated white-collar criminal offenders more leniently in sentencing than blue-collar offenders. Compare robbery and burglary to accounting fraud and embezzlement. Compare tax evasion under the Income Tax Act to fraud under the Unemployment Insurance Act. Compare traditional theft to misleading advertising. Existing studies reveal that white-collar offenders are less likely to be imprisoned and that they receive lower average sentences and serve less time.

I am currently reading a great book on the 1960's mutual fund rip off done by Bernard Cornfeld, the book is called Do You Sincerely Want To Be Rich. Cornfeld and his company IOS were operated out of Europe and registered on the American Stock exchange via Ontario. They were underwritten by the Royal Bank of Canada. They sold mutual funds, and created a super fund of mutual funds which was really composed of lots of mini mutual funds that IOS created. When the market crashed in 1970 their swindle was revealed. Bernie retired to Hollywood to live with Hedi Fleiss, the Hollywood Madame.

Beautifully engraved Certificate from the Investors Overseas Services issued in 1969. This historic document was printed by the Canadian Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of of a semi nude female sitting in front of an major industrial facility above the company's nototious logo. This item has the printed signatures of the company's officers including Bernard Cornfeld as President and is over 34 years old. There are 32 unused coupons attached to the bottom of this certificate not shown in the scan.

Robert Vesco

Another notrious crook took over IOS, Robert Vesco. Vesco ran a variety of financial black market operations including involvement with the U.S. Military and the spook (spy) community. He like Bernie also operated out of Canada for a while.




Sep. 19, 1983 The New Jersey financier fled the U.S. in 1972 after being indicted on charges that he looted $224 million from the Geneva-based Investors Overseas Services Ltd., and illegally donated $200,000 to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. Since then Vesco has lolled in exile in the Caribbean, apparently in the Bahamas, safe from extradition efforts.

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A Valhalla of the Vile/Here are the Felon Index rankings:

	Scammer	$mm (adjusted for inflation)	years served in prison	Felon Index Score
1.	Bernie Cornfeld (1970)	$2,305	0.92	2,514.5
2.	Michael Milken (1986)	$1,630	3	543.3
3.	Tino De Angelis (1963)	$1,170	7	167.1
4.	Stanley Goldblum (1973)	$1,209	8	151.1
5.	Ivan Boesky (1986)	$163	1.83	89.1
6.	Barry Minkow (1989)	$151	5	30.2
7.	Charles Ponzi (1920)	$ 17.9	5	3.6

The accounting firm Arthur Anderson, who also advised Mike Harris and his Ontario government about privatization schemes for work for welfare, was caught in the Enron scandal. But Wall Street knew about Andersons peccadillo for shady accounting. They had been Bernie Cornfelds IOS accounts back in the 1960's!

Enron and World Com were well connected with Bay Street and Canada's banking industry, CIBC the Royal Bank both had to bay out billions last year in fines for their involvement in the great dot.com swindle. And remember the Royal Bank underwrote Cornfelds IOS Fund of Funds back in the sixties.

Today CIBC is passing off its costs of fines for being a criminal onto its bond holders.
Bondholders warned to beware getting the short end of the stick

Then there are our own rip off artists, Nelson Skalbania and Peter Pocklington who profited during the wild boom and bust of the 1980's, taking advantage of the unregulated Alberta and B.C. stock market. They swindled investors, screwed workers, ripped off governments, and in the case of Pocklington never went to jail. Skalbania spent some time in jail, certainly less than an average street criminal. And once out was allowed to continue trading on the stock market in Canada.

Alberta is home to the Income Trust business in Canada. It originated in the petro-towers of Calgary. The first Canadian income trust was a petro trust. Modeled on the American Trusts, they have managed to become a tax haven because of loose or non existant tax rules.

Marcel Tremblay, inventor of Canadian income-trust structure, dies at 64

A bold business leader with more than 40 years of experience in Canada's investment-management and energy industries, Tremblay is best known as the inventor of the income-trust structure in Canada.

Tremblay designed and created Canada's first income trust, Enerplus Resources Fund, in 1986, spearheading a sector of the Canadian economy that now represents over 15 per cent of the market capitalization of the Toronto Stock Exchange.

"Convincing the brokerage community that this idea made sense was an almost impossible task," Tremblay told The Canadian Press in 2004.

"My objective was always to give investors the best return possible, minimize the taxation issues, preserve capital as much as possible and make sure they participate in the upside."

The effect that income trusts have had on the Canadian business landscape is dramatic, to say the least.

Income trusts are now the fastest-growing sector of Canadian capital markets because of their sizable distributions of income to unitholders and their considerable tax advantages over a standard corporate structure.

It is finally after all the political debate this past year a business that is now under the scrutiny of Standard and Poors in the U.S.

Obscure income trust reports can mislead investors: S&P

The two analysts said income trust reports are so obscure, and so full of distortions, they can easily lead investors astray. To make it worse, key information is often missing.

"Coupled with insufficient and inconsistent disclosure by management, the information risks inherent in this area of the Canadian capital markets continue to be quite significant," S&P said.

.

This is far more important an investigation than who leaked the Income Trust announcement. Though the profiteering off that announcement is an iconic metaphor for the shady nature of Income Trusts. Just as their name says it all, hiding income from the tax man

Also see:
Income Trusts
Corporate Welfare Bums
Criminal Capitalism
Crime



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Income Trusts

The Real Debt and Deficit Crisis

Here is the real crisis in the Canadian economy. One that could have a disastorous impact, read Black October 1929, if their should be a serious down turn in this overheated economy.

"Canadians have been spending at above-normal levels, while the personal savings rate has fallen below zero," said Terence Yuen, research economist for Watson Wyatt.

Lets repeat that shall we, savings have fallen below zero. Probably for the first time in the history of Canada, which was a savings based nation.

And while the dollar has risen impacting on sales and exports, the economy has been boosted by Petro dollars from the West and personal debt by Canadians.

Like our American counterparts, housing and consumer goods are driving the economy, not production. Not jobs. Rather we have a debt economy.

Meanwhile the Bank of Canada with its fetish for inflation, looking for it anywhere it can't find it. Because wages have been low, despite the boom economy.

The Bank of Canada has been raising its key interest rate slowly since September, citing the need to bring monetary stimulus to a more neutral level, given the strength of the Canadian economy. However, new wage data released yesterday showed salaries for unionized workers increased 2.3 per cent in November. While this number is much stronger than the 1.3-per-cent increase recorded for October, it's hardly strong enough to set off alarm bells.

Like I said that won't stop David Dodge and the Bank of Canada from plowing ahead with rate increases. Dumb, Dumb, Dumb.

Most economists say the bank will raise rates again in January and probably in March, but any rate increases after that will depend on what the U.S. Federal Reserve does and the strength of the Canadian dollar.

Meanwhile, TD Waterhouse released a poll that appeared to show diametrically different results.

The Toronto-based bank said a growing number of Canadian investors have lowered their expectations for 2006, continuing a trend that began in 2002.

The poll suggested only 36 per cent of those surveyed expected higher returns this year than last.

The bank also expects a U.S. economic slowdown in the third and fourth quarters that will negatively impact Canada's economy, directly through weaker exports and indirectly though softer demand for commodities.

Which would make raising interest rates a really DUMB idea. Especially in a non productive market. One that is relying on consumer spending rather than jobs and production to create national wealth.

Labour is in increasingly short supply and production in industries across the country has been pushed to its limits, but only a few business leaders expect inflation to pick up pace, the Bank of Canada's latest business outlook survey shows.c

More than a third of respondents said they would have some difficulty meeting an unexpected increase in demand, while 15 per cent said they would have significant difficulty. That's the highest level since the third quarter of 2000 at the height of the tech boom.

"Pressures on production capacity continue to intensify. They are at particularly high levels in Western Canada, limiting the scope for further increases in production and sales," says the November and December survey of about 100 firms. "A number of firms in the rest of the country report that they are more fully utilizing their existing capacity, after having recently rationalized their operations."

Now last time I checked labour shortages were supposed to mean wage increases, but that has not been happening. Instead the wage increases listed above are exactly what they have been for a decade. No different than the ninties during the Debt and Deficit hysteria in the Provinces and Ottawa.


Wages have always been the driver of the inflationary paranoia of the banks and the movers and shakers in the market place. Not prices. And despite a boom economy based on relatively low wage increases, the Bank of Canada will continue to raise interest rates.

Remember during the Mulroney Regime, the Banks high interest rate policy was an economic disaster for the country. Imagine a crash when Canadians have a personal deficit. The impact would be horendous on individuals and the economy.

Its time to regulate the Bank of Canada. It's power is to great to continue to allow it to be a rogue element of the State.


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Bank of Canada
economy
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Steel Wars-Why Isn't This An Election Issue

The battle is on in Canada's idigenous steel industry. Stelco is restructuring while Dofasco faces hostilbe take over bids. Meanwhile what are the political parties saying about this? Nada, nothing, zip. Not an election issue.

Losing our indigenous steel industry is NOT an election issue. This says a lot about priorities. Or lack of them. If Dofasco is sold, it will allow the Europeans an in to the North American market, without worrying about U.S. tarrifs and protectionist policies. And this is not an election issue.

And while it is non-union, Dofasco is the most efficient steel plant in North America. So why is it being allowed to be sold to European interests. With nary a peep out of the Liberals or Conservatives. This is the real story behind the election in Hamilton. And why the NDP will win seats there.

How high can Dofasco bids go?

Arcelor tops offer by German rival
New Dofasco bid is $71 a share

Arcelor bid wins Dofasco board's blessing Globe and Mail

Industry watchers regard Dofasco as a jewel of the North American steel industry because of its efficiencies and high-end steel customers, particularly major auto manufacturers.Dofasco, whose motto is, "Our product is steel. Our strength is people," employs about 11,000 workers and ships more than 5 million tonnes of steel annually. It is Canada's biggest steel maker. The takeover battle will likely leave the company under foreign control for the first time in its 94-year history."Dofasco is the best-run steel company in North America. It's the most profitable. It's the most efficient," Ryder said. "It's a bit like a Van Gogh has come on the market. They don't come on very often."

STEEL
Stelco board has spot for new CEO

By GREG KEENAN
Globe and Mail
Tuesday, January 17, 2006 Page B3

STEEL REPORTER

The proposed board of directors for Stelco Inc. includes a chair for the new chief executive officer who will replace Courtney Pratt, the man who steered the steel maker through two years of creditor protection.

Two managing partners of Tricap Management Ltd., a Brookfield Asset Management Inc., restructuring fund, and two Tricap nominees are among the nine members on the board, Stelco said in a release.

Mr. Pratt has been nominated as chairman. His replacement as CEO has not been named.

Mr. Pratt will be joined by Cyrus Madon and Peter Gordon, managing partners at Tricap. Tricap also nominated John Lacey, chairman of Alderwoods Group, North America's second-largest operator of funeral homes and cemeteries, and Tony Molluso, president and CEO of Concert Industries Ltd.

Two hedge funds that will take an equity stake in Stelco each nominated one director.

Sunrise Partners LP of Toronto nominated Laurie Bennett, a retired audit partner at Ernst & Young LLP. New York-based hedge fund Appaloosa Management LP chose Steven Cohn, managing director of Alvarez & Marsal LLC, a New York turnaround and restructuring firm.

Also picked for the board is Pierre Dupuis, former chief operating officer of Dorel Industries Inc.

Stelco Bankruptcy

Also See Time For A Canadian Steel Workers Union

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Canadian Anti-Whalers Attacked

A Canadian member of Greenpeace protesting the annual Japanese whaling hunt in the Antarctic was tossed out of his zodiac on the weekend. It's becoming a serious confrontation on the high seas as Japan insists on getting its quota of Whales for the sushi market.

Two Greenpeace ships, the Arctic Sunrise and Esperanza, have for weeks been harassing Japanese boats as they hunt for 850 minke whales and 10 fin whales that Japan says are needed for scientific research.

International Whaling Commission rules permit the research hunt, but Australia and other anti-whaling countries say it is really commercial whaling in disguise. The meat collected is later sold in Japan.

Last week, the Arctic Sunrise collided with whaling factory ship the Nisshin Maru, damaging both vessels but causing no injuries. Both sides blamed one another for the crash.

Then late Saturday, Canadian activist Texas Constantine was thrown out of a small inflatable boat that had been manoeuvring between a harpooner and a minke whale and spent several minutes in the icy waters before being hauled back on board.

"We were out defending the whales. We had been out there for about an hour. I was driving our boat and we were in a good position and the whaler fired its harpoon," Constantine said in a statement.

"All of a sudden the harpoon line came down on us trapping us between the whale and the catcher," he said.

"The line came tight at that point and threw me from the boat into the water. It was a few minutes before our boat was able to come over and pick me up out of the water."

And the Greenpeace activists have blogged about the Whalers, willing to kill at any cost.

14 January 2006

Would you kill, to kill a whale

by Andrew, onboard the Esperanza

©Greenpeace/Davison
Yushin Maru No.2

I'm asking a serious question here of the whalers. "Would you kill a person to kill a whale?" Because that is what it is down to here in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The reports and video from the Arctic Sunrise boat crew makes that abundantly clear. Meanwhile, out in the Billy G. we had our own close firing - not as menacing as the behaviour the Arctic Sunrise folks saw, but still irresponsibly close.

I've never seen anything like this. It's my third trip to down here, and I can only attribute the whalers' behaviour to two things - the fact that they've more than doubled the number of whales they want to kill, and that we're being more effective then ever before at non-violently protecting these whales from the harpoon.

It's worth pointing out that as Greenpeace activists we've chosen to use peaceful tactics - to not put the whalers' safety at risk, no matter what. We also each choose to put ourselves in harms way. But the whaler with the gun also has to make a choice about whether to pull that trigger. For the safety of my crewmates - I hope he doesn't make the wrong one.

If you know anyone working on the whaling ships, maybe ask them to ask themselves, "If you don't shoot, what is the worst that could happen? If you do pull that trigger, what is the worst possible outcome then? Which would you rather live with?"

I'll admit, I'm partly asking this for selfish reasons. Because that guy in the Greenpeace boat. That's going to be me.

Protesters join forces against whaling

Something about whales

Paul Watson: Chasing the whalers - part 6

Very little coverage has been given to this campaign in the Canadian media, and when they finally do, on the CTV news, this is what they run;Protest may hurt anti-whaling campaign: Australia

Do I detect some bias here? The real story is that it is Canadians battling the Japanese trawlers. Which is dangerous business indeed. I guess whale's aren't as cute as seals, so we will have to wait for the media to cover the Seal Hunt protests. Out of sight out of mind seems to be the policy for covering environmental clashes in the Canadian media.

Or maybe it's cause the Japanese are out business partners, you know Toyota, Honda and now; Japan looks to oil sands to ease reliance on Middle East

See my

Confrontation on the High Seas

Real Junk Science

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endangered species
environment
Japan
Whales
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Junk Science

Hanging Chads in Iraq

There is a certain irony here, that of course will be lost on George W. Iraqi ballot boxes annulled on fraud claims Perhaps the provisional government in Iraq would like to ask the United States Supreme court to resolve the problem seeing as they did such a good job in the 2000 election.

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A Libertarian Defense of the Left Wing in Latin America

Yes you read that right. Pardon the pun. Not all Libertarians are merely dyed in the wool right wingers like Colby Cosh, who uses the term to somehow indicate that he is just a Republican wannabe in Canada. See my article Cosh Slanders Chavez Again

A fruitful debate from the Libertarian Left on Latin America has been posted at Kevin Carson's Mutualist Blog.

Vulgar Libertarianism Watch, Part XV: Lula and Chavez and Morales, Oh My!

There's been a lot of right-wing pissing and moaning out there recently about Venezuela and Bolivia, a lot of it under "free market" colors. First off, Doug Allen at Catallarchy:

Add another anti-US leftist [Evo Morales] to the Latin American leader list.

Well, for anyone who's just emerged from a time warp and has a century worth of news to catch up on, I'd say the Latin American left has some pretty fucking good reasons to be anti-US.

In the comments to the same post, Jonathan Wilde identifies Hugo Chavez as

the latest in a long tradition of South American populist thugs like Allende and Lula.

Well, golly, we can't have any of those thugs in South America now, can we? Given the vast number of individuals who might have deserved that epithet in recent Latin American history, Wilde's singling out of Allende and Lula speaks volumes. First, consider the wide range of political forces in Latin America over the past half century or so; the single biggest, probably, is the U.S. government--the Marines, CIA, and School of the Americas, inter alia. Next, consider the governments installed by the U.S. over the same period by means of those same interventionist forces, starting with the intervention in Guatemala in 1954, continuing through the Brazilian coup in the 1960s, the overthrow of Allende, Operation Condor, and the tens upon tens of thousands of people murdered by U.S.-supported death squads in the 1980s. Finally, consider that the two most prominent political figures in Chile alone in the past 35 years have been Allende and Pinochet. The choice of Allende and Lula as exemplary "thugs," in such a context, indicates (to put it mildly) a rather idiosyncratic view of reality.

And it just gets better and better. And so do the lengthy contributions in the comments section.


So next time Colby Cosh calls himself a Libertarian you now know he is no such thing he is just another vulgar right wing reactionary.

Meanwhile the right wing will have another excuse to avoid reality, that the IMF and the neo-liberal agenda in Latin America is a failure. Consequently the basket case economies created by the IMF like Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, etc. has led to the revival of a viable left wing mass movement on the contient. A movement that is about worker and community control, rather than just statist-nationalization.

Now Chile has elected its first Woman President who is a socialist. A Victim of Pinochet Is Chile's New Leader

Yep the American Imperative, the Monroe Doctrine, in Latin America is tumbling down like a house of cards. Vive le Revolucion.


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Chavez
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CN In Court Again

The click clack, click clack another train disaster on the track. CN being brought to justice again, for causing yet another environmental disaster.

This time it was a forest fire, outside of St. Albert in 2001. Again the wheels of justice move slowly when it comes to corporate criminals. But should you shoplift $5 bucks worth of make-up they throw the book at ya and your in jail faster than you can say Perry Mason.

Not so for our corporate citizens, and since corporations are considered 'individuals' under the law in North America, who with their battery of high priced lawyers can avoid justice being done and being seen to being done.

CN stalls for years and then come the court case capitualtes and admits it's guilt.

CN Rail to plead guilty in Chisholm fire in 2001
The trial of CN Rail and three other rail companies over a fire in 2001 near Chisholm began in a St. Albert court today with the lawyer for CN saying the company plans to plead guilty.

Judge Leo Burgess of provincial court said he will hear the guilty plea after the prosecution presents it case against three other rail companies that are fighting the charge. The trial is expected to last 2 1/2 month.

This follows a $18.6 million out-of-court settlement reached last week between CN Rail and the Alberta government over a May 2001 wildfire that destroyed 10 homes in Chisholm, 150 kilometres north of Edmonton, and scorched 116,000 hectares of forest. The fire cost about $30 million to suppress, making it among the costliest forest fires in Alberta history.

CN Rail, along with RaiLink Canada Ltd., RaiLink Ltd. and RailAmerica Inc., were charged under the Forest Prairie and Protection Act with “conducting an activity in a forest protection area without exercising reasonable care.” The companies face a fine of $5,000 if convicted.

Of course, cause its bad for business to have a long drawn out court case that might expose the company to further civil law suits. Better to cry Uncle and pay the fine. CN paying $18.6-million over 2001 Alberta fire

Again the company sacrifices the community and public interest and safety on the altar of the bottom line. Their failure to maintain their track. Just like all the other disasters they had in 2005. It's called Risk Assessment. Where the risk of getting caught is less important than making a profit.It's the result of the privatization of this former publicly owned and operated corporation.

More CN Stories

Also See

Corporate Watch

Health and Safety

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