Thursday, July 14, 2016

Dutch Central Bank Prepares its Boldest Blockchain Experiment Yet

The central bank of the Netherlands is preparing an ambitious experiment aimed at discerning if an entire financial market can be built on a blockchain.
While many so-called smart contract applications of blockchains can be replicated using existing technology, the man in charge of a series of experiments conducted by De Nederlandsche Bank says the distributed nature of blockchains could lead to entirely re-imagined financial market infrastructures (FMIs), ones that are much more difficult to hack.
Like the bitcoin network itself, the experiment envisions how an FMI's internal operations could be distributed among participating nodes. To game the system – and break the financial market infrastructure — an attacker would need to gain more than half the computing power running the nodes.
News of the experiment, scheduled to begin later this year, comes as financial market infrastructures are increasingly being targeted by hackers. Earlier this month, the chairman of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) went so far as to call for immediate action on potential solutions to the issue.
Now in a new interview, De Nederlandsche Bank's head of market infrastructure, Ron Berndsen, explained why he believes blockchain could be the key to preventing more attacks.
Berndsen told CoinDesk:
"If hackers were to go through the trouble of taking down two or three data centers they would take down the financial markets infrastructure. With blockchain, you could distribute the nodes and you might not even know where they are."
To learn if an FMI can be distributed via a blockchain, Berndsen is once again tapping into the team he assembled for earlier experiments at the central bank.
Berndsen said he recruited the team of seven around coffee machines and via email invitations sent to bitcoin enthusiasts he identified within the bank.
The academic and banker is rare in the world of global financial bankers in that he began running a full node on the bitcoin network and mining the digital currency in the early part of 2013. Though he said he never earned a mining reward for his efforts, he purchased bitcoin and other digital currencies to learn the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Lessons for central banks

As a result of that familiarity, Berndsen has been able to scale up his experiments.
Announced last month, the central bank began using the open-source bitcoin software to recreate conditions at the network's inception in 2009 in an effort to model what the system might look like in 2140, when the last bitcoin is mined.
"As an academic it was very obvious to recreate the extreme points," said Berndsen, who has a doctorate in economics and is a professor of FMIs and systemic risk at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. However, he said he now believes the test to be among the more unique globally.
"I thought every central bank would have done this," he said, adding:
"I’m on many central bank committees and I expected they were all doing this, but so far they weren’t."
Among the lessons he learned from the experiments, is that the bank was able to mine what the team called DNBcoins at a much faster rate by starting with an initial block reward of 1bn DNBcoins and halving the reward every two minutes.
Of note, he said his team observed that even if what they call the "max money parameter" was set to 21 million coins — as is the case with bitcoin — they were able to mine 10 billion coins.
They also "proved" that a network could continue to run on fees alone after the bitcoin reward is dispersed, he said.

High stakes

The third experiment, Berndsen said, will now be aimed in the area of financial markets infrastructure.
As defined by the Bank for International Settlements in a 2012 report, an FMI is a "multilateral system among participating institutions, including the operator of the system, used for the purposes of clearing, settling or recording payments, securities, derivatives, or other financial transactions."
In Berndsen’s speech announcing the results of his first two experiments, he listed FMIs as one of three crucial components of "the overarching goal of financial stability" that his bank aims to provide.
But this year has proven a turning point in the history of FMIs, which have become increasingly alluring targets for sophisticated international attacks.
In March, Bloomberg reported that hackers linked to the Iranian government had attacked about four dozen US financial institutions, including the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
A month after the report, security expert Eugen Kapersky predicted an increase in financial market threats following a separate attack against Bangladesh’s central bank by hackers who moved the Russian ruble’s exchange rate, according to another Bloomberg report.
The threats against FMIs has been so pervasive that earlier this month the chairman of the BIS Benoit Coeure published “Guidance on cyber resilience for financial market infrastructures.”
In the report Coeure wrote:
"FMIs should immediately take necessary steps in concert with relevant stakeholders to improve their cyber resilience, taking into account this guidance. FMIs should also, within 12 months of the publication of this guidance, have developed concrete plans to improve their capabilities."

Preparing for the big day

Holland’s central bank has been taking an increasingly public position in its efforts to lead other central banks to consider blockchain applications for a wide-range of possible solutions, now including financial market infrastructures.
In addition to speaking about their bitcoin blockchain experiments at last month’s Dutch Blockchain Conference, the bank last week announced its plans to open a blockchain campus by early September of this year.
Berndsen said it will take years before the full potential of blockchain becomes clear, and that his bank is working to help accelerate that learning curve.
In preparation for the FMI experiment, Berndsen told CoinDesk De Nederlandsche Bank is currently "engaged" with other parties in the industry and other central banks to see if they want to join the experiment as partners.
Berndsens said:
"We have the idea that this next prototype might require more coding, more thinking and we might need more people."

http://coincenter.org/link/a-new-nyse-traded-bitcoin-etf-if-about-to-give-the-winklevoss-bitcoin-trust-a-run-for-its-money 

Tuesday, July 12, 2016

A Computerized Trader Just Beat Banks in Top Currency Ranks

Computerized trading firm XTX Markets Ltd. has come from nowhere to dethrone major banks including Deutsche Bank AG in the rankings of the world’s biggest spot currency traders.
The London-based proprietary trader is now the fourth biggest, accounting for 7.6 percent of spot foreign exchange -- a subset of the overall currency market. It’s the first time an electronic specialist has displaced a bank in Euromoney Institutional Investor Plc’s annual survey.
Deutsche Bank has a 7.1 percent share of spot trading, according to Euromoney’s 2016 poll. The German bank was second only to Citigroup Inc. in 2015. XTX was the ninth biggest firm for overall foreign-exchange trading, which also includes swaps and options.
Its name is a reference to a mathematical expression, and the firm was spun off from quantitative hedge fund GSA Capital last year.
XTX’s sudden arrival in foreign exchange is part of an evolution that has already made itself felt in the stock market, where banks are surrendering market making to companies that specialize in electronic trading. XTX says it relies on quantitative research, machine learning and correlations between assets to generate prices.
“Electronic market making is entering other asset classes, whether it’s fixed income or others,” said Steve Grob, global director of group strategy at Fidessa Group Plc. “The foreign-exchange market is worth trillions and trillions -- it would seem an obvious direction of travel.”

Monday, July 11, 2016

Behind The IEX Crusade To Fix The Market, In Its Own Words

First, congratulations to IEX on their approval as a US stock exchange, against Nasdaq's and the rest of the industry's best efforts. In June the SEC said IEX's proposal to launch a national exchange had been approved. The SEC determined that IEX's "speed-bump", or the delay a longer wire would introduce when connecting traders to the matching engine, "will not prevent investors from accessing stock prices in a fair and efficient manner consistent with the goals of the Order Protection Rule."
IEX has taken a lot of risk to stand up and actually build something that would help break down the wall that was created around the high-powered and well-funded cabal of insiders who have chopped-up and staked-claim to various market centers. As Brad Katsuyama, CEO of IEX, says in the video below "this was mostly going to be my last job on Wall Street. You know, you can't fight the system and fail and expect the system to accept you back." That comment comes as a video plays of then Direct Edge CEO William O'Brien losing his mind in a then-live debate as he realized his "good faith effort" to explain market structure was failing in the midst of Kasuyama's cool demeanor and ability to clearly explain a complex topic such as how a trade is made in the US equity market.
Now as the world races around in a cloud of uncertainty trying to figure out where the next QE will come from, whether Italy will need a bailouthow big the next China bailout will, or whether the UK will actually leave the EU, IEX has fought to become a venue where fair trading takes place. It is harsh already for main-street to understand and stay on top global developments. They should not need to struggle between choosing a Post No Preference Blind Limit Order or a Routed Peg Order.
Complexity in finance acts as a barrier and IEX has been taking on career risk as the employees fought back against the system. Indeed, as we said, we were surprised that the SEC recommended approving IEX's application. Just shy 1 minute into the video Katsuyama discusses fairness and taking action over just speaking. This is Wall Street cleaning itself up from the inside out.
If IEX could smash together this group and take on the system that nearly ruined Haim Bodek, imagine if someone within the central bank stood up against the insane manipulation we've witnessed. And just in case you forgot how markets respond to the Fed, there are still some 12 to 14 more Fed head discussions taking place before Midnight on Friday in which to experience real manipulation done in a way the exchanges can only dream of.

Sunday, July 10, 2016

EES: 3 Things stock investors need to know about FX

The stock market cap in the United States is about $22 Trillion.  The amount of money in Managed Currency strategies is unknown, but it's very small, even by CTA standards.  According to data based on CTAs listed with Barclay Hedge, there's about 19 Billion in Currency Strategies.  That's a lot of money, but not a drop in the bucket when compared with equities.  And remember that although money in equities isn't all 'managed' - all money in equities is an investment of some kind - because people don't need equities like they need FX.  To contrast it with FX, all money in FX is NOT managed, to the contrary - most money in FX is hedged, or transactional.  FX as an asset class per se is a growth emerging asset class, and may be the 'stock market' of the 21st century, what the stock market was to the 20th century.  But at the moment, the idea of investing in FX as an asset class - is just in its infancy.  The more problems associated with stocks, the more that will change.  And while the Fed's been doing a great job propping the stock market, inflating assets artificially usually doesn't end well.
Here's the 3 most important things stock investors need to know about FX:
1) No one has to buy a stock.  Businesses need FX.  There's a huge difference.  
2) Rich families, old money, always has FX in their portfolio.  Yes, it's partly because of their international exposures, but Soros family office made a hefty mutli-billion profit on "Brexit Day."  
3) Big Wall St. firms that everyone perceives as 'credible' - make huge profits in FX.  In the case of many banks, not to name names - their FX profits have kept them alive.  Some of these banks are being eaten alive like a cancer from the inside, with losses on complex derivatives that no one understands exept a few quants, unable to grow in an environment of ZIRP and NIRP (Negative Interest Rate Policy). In many cases, their FX profits have literally kept them afloat.  And to put the icing on the FX cake, many of their FX profits can be flexible for their accounting departments to use them in times of need (i.e. "Currency Headwinds").
Brexit and its aftermath should be a wake up call to equity people.  Some FX traders reported making 9% during Brexit and more.
To learn more about FX as an emerging asset class, checkout the book Splitting Pennies - Understanding Forex - or Dive in! Open an account!

Singapore Dollar And Other Emerging Markets Currencies May Have A Boost Post Brexit

Summary

While the world has been watching EUR, GBP, USD, and other majors, exotics remain in the periphery.
Emerging market currencies like Singapore Dollar SGD may benefit post Brexit.
Singapore is an interesting post Brexit Currency example because Singapore was part of Britain.
Singapore Dollar is offered as an ETF FXSG.
While the world watches Europe unravel, little attention is being paid to the rest of the world. In this case, that means countries who are not affected by Brexit or the European Union. This includes BRICs, Africa, Canada, most of Asia, Australia & New Zealand, Central and South America, and many other countries. An interesting one as an example is Singapore, because Singapore had the equivalent of a referendum in 1959 and decided to be independent.

Thursday, July 7, 2016

How Far Down Can Go The Great British Pound

Summary

GBP has sold off more after Brexit vote, and rumors it will go further.
Will GBP continue to slide, or is this a buying opportunity?
GBP can probably sell off a little more - but not below 1.25.
GBP should retrace, as all currencies usually do after a downturn.
A GBP recovery should be in the cards in the near future.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON SEEKING ALPHA

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

SIBOR Forex Banking Fraud EXPOSED - another FX rate rigging scandal

Forex has been the big banks secret gold mine, supporting their other losing operations (like normal banking business, lending, etc.).  To a large extent this has been unraveling, and this SIBOR lawsuit is another attack on their risk free profit center (FX).  Read the entire lawsuit released by Elite E Services here in full.  More than 50 unknown defendants and about 20 known FX banks are named in the case, submitted in the UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK.  Most notably:
C. The CFTC, FSA, and MAS Found that Defendants Manipulated SIBOR and SOR
109. Multiple government investigations conducted by the MAS, CFTC, and the FSA
revealed Defendants’ agreement to illegally manipulate SIBOR and SOR.
110. MAS’ Findings. MAS uncovered a widespread conspiracy in which 133 of
Defendants’ traders sought to manipulate both SIBOR and SOR.
111. As punishment for their manipulative conduct, MAS forced all of the Defendants
to make massive interest-free deposits of between 100 million and 1.2 billion Singapore dollars
each, or 9.6 billion U.S. dollars collectively, preventing the conspiracy from using these funds
(and stripping its profit-making potential) for a full year.75
...
The common purpose of the enterprise was simple: profiteering. By engaging in
the predicate acts alleged including, but not limited to, transmitting or causing false and artificial
SIBOR submissions to be transmitted to Thomson Reuters as Agent for the ABS, and by
exchanging SIBOR- and SOR-based derivatives positions and prices, Defendants affected the
prices of SIBOR- and SOR-based derivatives, rendering them artificial. This directly resulted in
Defendants reaping hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in illicit trading profits on
their SIBOR- and SOR-based derivatives positions.
Technically, anyone who traded USD/SGD would have been affected by such manipulation - but any trader knows that the FX markets are completely manipulated (specifically, FX markets are manipulated because central banks set the M3 and interest rate).  
It seems that the WM/Reuters fines & settlements opened a can of worms for the FX banks, who may be forced to find another, more savvy way of fleecing clients, as referenced in the lawsuit:
Specifically, the CFTC found that:
(a) Deutsche Bank engaged in systemic and pervasive misconduct directed at
manipulating these international financial benchmark rates over a six-year period,
including manipulating SIBOR.79
(b) UBS derivatives traders manipulated the official fixings of LIBORs for
multiple currencies, including SIBOR, SOR, Yen LIBOR, Swiss Franc LIBOR,
Sterling LIBOR, and Euro LIBOR.80 The CFTC noted that
misconduct for SIBOR and SOR was “similar” to that found in UBS’
manipulation of other interbank offered rates.81
(c) RBS derivatives and money market traders manipulated SIBOR and SOR
from May 2010 – August 2011, even as RBS was being investigated for (and
conducting its own internal investigation related to) manipulating other interbank
offered rates.82
116. As a result of their manipulation of multiple interbank offered rates, Deutsche
Bank, RBS, and UBS collectively paid nearly $2 billion in fines as part of their settlement
agreements with the CFTC.
So here we have it in black and white - FX markets are manipulated.  

THE STRANGE STORY OF A MURDERED BANKER IN PUERTO RICO

On the day Maurice Spagnoletti was murdered, his black Lexus sedan was full of balloons. It was June 15, 2011, the day before his wife’s birthday, and he was planning a celebration.

Spagnoletti, 57, was the No. 2 executive at Doral Bank in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Once flush, the bank had been almost ruined by a fraud scandal, and in 2007 it was rescued by Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, and a group of hedge funds. The Wall Street investors had put up $610 million, but Doral continued to lose money, and they were losing patience. In late 2010, Doral hired Spagnoletti, a New Jerseyan experienced in managing large banks, with orders to reduce costs and get Puerto Rican operations under control.

When the banker arrived on the island, he made a good first impression. At 6 feet 2 inches and about 250 pounds, with a strong Jersey accent and hands that he used to punctuate his sentences, Spagnoletti reminded his new colleagues of Tony Soprano without the menace. He’d walk through the Doral office, stopping at underlings’ desks to get up to speed on who ran what and how.

The sun was setting on another muggy San Juan day as Spagnoletti pulled out of Doral’s bland office park downtown. His wife was waiting at home with their 6-year-old daughter. He’d flown his sister-in-law in for the party, too. The drive to his condo on palm-tree-lined Condado Beach took just 15 minutes when there wasn’t traffic. But a few minutes after Spagnoletti got onto the highway, he slowed for a backup on a bridge over a canal. Another car pulled up alongside his. Someone fired at least nine shots from a .40-caliber handgun, shattering his windows, and four bullets hit him in the head. Spagnoletti’s momentum sent his car veering off the highway, and it came to a stop in a thicket of tropical brush. The police arrived, and at 7:21 p.m. they pronounced him dead.

The identities of Spagnoletti’s killers are still a mystery, and the bank overhaul that he was hired to lead didn’t work without him. Doral collapsed in 2015, the biggest U.S. bank failure since 2010, done in by bad loans and Puerto Rico’s decade-long economic spiral. The Wall Street investors who hadn’t already sold were wiped out, and the U.S. government spent $700 million to cover depositors’ losses.

Today, almost everyone in San Juan banking circles has a theory about the murder. Some believe only Colombian hit men could pull off such an assassination. Others say Spagnoletti had enemies in the U.S. who caught up with him. His widow, Marisa, revealed her own theory in a 2013 lawsuit: She said he was killed because he uncovered fraud at the bank and fired an executive he suspected of embezzlement. Doral’s lawyers called her claims ridiculous, and after Marisa admitted in a deposition that she had no evidence, she withdrew the suit.

Since then, new details of the killing have emerged. And according to former Doral executives and people working on the criminal investigation, the widow was onto something. “Let’s use our common sense for a second,” says María Domínguez, who was in charge of an investigation into Doral as first assistant U.S. attorney in San Juan until she retired last year. “This guy was brought by the bank to put the house in order. He starts uncovering certain things that are irregular at the bank. He starts to take corrective action. These circumstances strongly suggest a financial motive to get this guy out of the way.”

But this wasn’t the usual Puerto Rican corruption. The real story of Maurice Spagnoletti’s murder may be more bizarre than anyone knew.

Doral Bank’s founder was Salomon Levis, whose Jewish father fled Poland to escape the Nazis. The family settled in Cuba, where Salomon was born, then moved to Puerto Rico. In 1972, Levis and his siblings started a mortgage company that would become Doral. The bank took off as the island prospered, and by 2001 it was originating almost half the home loans in Puerto Rico. Its profits peaked at almost $490 million in 2004. Around then, the Levis family’s 8 percent stake in the bank was valued at $355 million, making them among the island’s richest people. Salomon Levis, who had become a corpulent playboy, was a fixture at high society events, and the gossip pages chronicled his divorce and remarriage to a much younger blond lawyer.

Then it all unraveled. In 2005 the bank revealed it had inflated its earnings by about $1 billion, prompting investigations. Levis wasn’t charged, but his nephew went to prison for fraud, and the Levis family was forced out of the bank.

“We had a real mess,” says John Ward, who was appointed interim chief executive officer in 2005. The bank didn’t have enough money to pay off $625 million of debt coming due. The board wanted a CEO from outside Puerto Rico to clean house and attract new investors. In 2006 they found Glen Wakeman, who was running GE Capital’s consumer credit business in Mexico and the rest of Latin America.

Wakeman, then 46, had graduated from the University of Scranton and spent more than 20 years working for General Electric around the world. In Mexico he’d taken a stagnant business and more than doubled its size, according to Mark Begor, his boss at the time, who calls Wakeman an “energizing and passionate leader.” To lure him to Puerto Rico, Doral offered a minimum of $5 million in pay over the first two years, plus $1.5 million in stock and $6 million to make up for his GE pension.

Wakeman believed fervently in the GE management philosophy. He liked to talk about Six Sigma, the quality mantra popularized by former GE CEO Jack Welch. He hired bankers from Bear Stearns to find new investors, shuttled to New York to meet with hedge funds, and replaced most of Levis’s deputies.

Lesbia Blanco, then 59 and a human resource director at Johnson & Johnson, was one of the new executives. As Doral’s new chief talent and administrative officer, Blanco was part of Wakeman’s inner circle, with an office near his on the ninth floor of headquarters. She soon realized something strange was going on at Doral. One Saturday in 2006 or 2007, she says, when she was working overtime to help prepare the bank to court Wall Street investors, a security guard came by her office. He told her there was someone in Wakeman’s office he didn’t recognize and showed her a security-camera picture of a man wearing a beaded necklace and clothes that were unusually casual for the executive floor.

Blanco walked over to investigate. Wakeman’s secretary was there with the stranger. She told Blanco that the man was her Santeria godfather and that he was helping the bank with its recapitalization.

The religion known as Santeria emerged in the 16th century among people from West Africa, called Yoruba, who were enslaved and brought to the Caribbean. Co-opting the Catholicism that their captors tried to impose, they picked saints to represent their deities and continued to worship them in secret, with drum circles and animal sacrifices in the woods. The religion now has about 70,000 followers in Puerto Rico, according to Joaquín “Kimmy” Solis, president of the island’s Yoruba association.

The man Blanco saw in the CEO’s office was Rolando Rivera Solis. Kimmy Solis says Rivera, a distant cousin, is a babalawo, or Santeria high priest. As a babalawo, Rivera can initiate others into the religion, conduct sacrifices, and divine the destinies of his followers by tossing coconut rinds on the ground.

Blanco started seeing Rivera on the executive floor more and more. “He had access to Glen’s office directly,” she says. She says her secretary once had to clean Wakeman’s clothes – it’s not clear of what – after a ritual at the Santeria priest’s house.

Blanco wondered why the American CEO was dabbling in the local religion, but kept her questions to herself. Wakeman was close with his secretary, Nancy Vélez. Other than his driver, who doubled as a bodyguard, she was the only person allowed to ride in the executive elevator with him. She would walk him out of the building, carrying his briefcase, then kiss him goodbye on the cheek as he got into his chauffeured car, according to two people who saw them. Such embraces aren’t uncommon in Puerto Rican culture.

Other Doral employees started to notice unusual things. Juan de la Cruz, the bank’s vice president for security, says someone told him Vélez and Rivera were conducting Santeria rituals in the boardroom. There was no security camera there, but de la Cruz checked the footage from one in the hallway. “I looked in the camera and saw Rolando,” he says, “walking with the luggage and some bottles in his hand.” De la Cruz says he dropped his inquiry after another employee who practiced Santeria told him that the rituals were sanctioned by Wakeman.

A former administrative assistant, who asked for anonymity because she’s afraid of the babalawo, says Vélez told her about one ritual involving a caiman, an alligator-like reptile native to Puerto Rico. Rivera, Vélez, and another Doral employee drove the caiman to the parking lot early one Sunday, the former assistant says, and used Vélez’s access to the executive elevator to bypass security. Dressed all in white, they took the caiman into the conference room and invoked the names of each board member, the former assistant says she was told. She adds that she thinks the creature wasn’t killed, because she didn’t see any blood the next day.

Lizzie Rosso, Doral’s general manager for consumer banking at the time, says someone who was at the caiman ritual told her about it the following Monday. Other former Doral employees declined to discuss the subject. “Maybe they are afraid of the Santeria and the consequences,” Rosso says, laughing nervously. “I don’t want to be killed.”

Solis, the Yoruba association president, is skeptical that a caiman would have been involved. “We sacrifice rams, goats, chickens, roosters — all this is part of the ancient religions,” he says. “I don’t believe that the caiman has the power to do anything.”

If Rivera did perform a ritual, it was apparently successful. In May 2007, Doral announced it had sold 90 percent of its stock for $610 million to a group of investors including Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Marathon Asset Management, D.E. Shaw, and Perry Capital. Eleven months later, Rivera was given a contract to clean Doral’s headquarters and branch offices. The head of the previous janitorial service says she’d never heard of Rivera in her 17 years in the local cleaning business. Rivera’s company, SJ Tropical Maintenance Services, wasn’t registered until the month he won the contract. And while the old cleaners charged $23,000 a month, SJ Tropical was given $27,350.

Blanco says the contract was sanctioned by Wakeman. “It was a reward for helping Glen [keep] the bank afloat,” she says.

Wakeman, who’s been working as a consultant in Miami since Doral failed, denies any allegations he’d been involved with Rivera, practiced Santeria, or rewarded the high priest. “This is both shocking and untrue,” he says. Wakeman’s lawyer declined to comment further.

Rivera’s lawyer, Melanie Carrillo-Jiménez, says that while her client is a high priest, he didn’t perform any ritual for the bank. “He wasn’t getting paid for any Santeria whatsoever,” she says. “Where the hell did this come from?”

Doral’s vice president for property and facilities, Annelise Figueroa, oversaw the new, more expensive maintenance contract. She says the contract included additional services and was approved by Wakeman, who, Figueroa says, did practice Santeria. “Wakeman used Rolando,” she says. “When I found out, obviously I thought it was weird, but then again you can’t mess with people’s religions.”

Figueroa and Blanco, her boss, didn’t make an issue of the janitorial contract. But in 2009 and 2010, they accused each other of inflating the costs of other services. Blanco says she investigated her subordinate and told Wakeman that the bank should fire Figueroa. Wakeman overruled Blanco, without saying why, she says, and began to freeze her out. “Since that day, my life was miserable there,” Blanco says. “He didn’t involve me in any meetings. I was just there like a piece of paper that you move from one side to another.”

Blanco left Doral in October 2010. By then, Wakeman had already given some of her responsibilities to a new executive: Spagnoletti. “He had access to all the information in my computer,” Blanco says. “All the details on what had happened to that investigation. Perhaps he got suspicious and started digging.”

Blanco says she feels lucky she escaped with her life. “I thank my Lord every day,” she says. “That person didn’t go there to be killed, but to work. It’s bad.”

Marisa Spagnoletti now runs a handbag boutique in Morristown, N.J., called Lucy’s Gift, named after her daughter. The handbags are displayed by color — blue and pink on the left, orange and white on the right. A photo of Maurice with his arms around Marisa and their daughter sits on a mantel, surrounded by pink cloth roses and Christmas lights. All the profits go to charities to honor Spagnoletti’s memory.

“When Maurice was killed, it took so long to get on my feet,” Marisa says on an April morning, her eyes filling with tears. “Do you know what it’s like for a girl to cry every day, ‘Who killed my daddy?’ ”

Two women walk into the shop to browse. Marisa has never met them but tells them a little about Maurice’s murder. She says she still cries herself to sleep every night. With a reporter, Marisa won’t discuss her lawsuit against Doral, other than to say the bank hasn’t given her any money. When she withdrew the suit, she did so in a way that allows her to refile it later. When the truth comes out, she says, it will show that Maurice was a hero. “My husband would die with honor rather than live a life of dishonesty,” she says.

Spagnoletti started working as a bank teller in New Jersey as a teenager, according to his widow. He got a business degree at night and worked his way up in the course of 20 years, eventually becoming president of Summit Bank’s Pennsylvania division. He raised two children with his first wife. Then, in 1999, Maurice reconnected with Marisa. They’d worked together at a Summit predecessor but didn’t know each other well and had been called to testify in a court case about the bank. Maurice and Marisa were both Italian and Catholic. He’d grown up in Jersey City, and she was from Bayonne, just a few miles away. Spagnoletti was 11 years older. On the last night of the trial, he asked her out. They were married the next year.

Marisa says Maurice would cheer her up when she had problems at work. “Go look outside,” he would say. “The sun’s out, the sun’s going to always come out. Everything can be solved.”

In 2000, Spagnoletti joined Fifth Third Bank. He became head of its central Indiana affiliate, presiding over branch openings and organizing field trips for schoolchildren. He won over his new colleagues with jokes but held them accountable for meeting the goals they set. Spagnoletti would invite them and their spouses to his home for bocce and pasta. He said the word “great” so incessantly that it became a running joke at the office.

After a few years at another bank in South Carolina, the Spagnolettis moved back to New Jersey around 2008 because Marisa’s father was dying. Maurice used the free time to dote on his daughter, who was then 3. Bruce Balmas, who worked with him at Fifth Third and Doral, says his friend would call him from the park and say, “I never could have done this before.”

Two years later, recruiters contacted Maurice, asking if he’d consider moving to Puerto Rico. The package at Doral included, in addition to a $400,000 salary, a $300,000 target bonus, making him among the highest-paid people at the bank. Spagnoletti was hired as executive vice president for mortgage and banking operations, responsible for what happened in Puerto Rico day to day.

When Spagnoletti arrived in September 2010, Wakeman was battling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The CEO was saddled with billions in loans the bank had made under its previous owners; as Puerto Rico tipped into recession, Doral had to keep marking the loans down, eroding its capital. The FDIC blocked Wakeman’s plan to buy assets from Doral’s rivals, and without a clear plan for growth, some of the bank’s Wall Street investors bolted. Goldman Sachs lost at least $30 million, and the hedge funds Marathon, D.E. Shaw, and Perry lost about $50 million each, filings show.

After the killing, Marisa was hysterical. The bank sent armed guards to walk executives home.
Spagnoletti admired Wakeman as a CEO and believed the bank could be turned around. “I’m working harder than ever, but I must say I love it,” Spagnoletti wrote in an e-mail to a friend on April 22, 2011. “I make significant contributions and feel very appreciated. One problem is the lack of talent. I need to check everyone’s answer twice. Otherwise, this is a GE type of environment. Sigma Six black belts running around.”

Initially, Spagnoletti commuted from New Jersey. He and Marisa never stayed apart for more than three days. They lived in a Marriott hotel for a while, and then a condo on Condado Beach. In the spring of 2011, Spagnoletti hired Balmas as a consultant; they had dinners at an Italian restaurant by the beach and spent some nights gambling at casinos on the Condado strip. Spagnoletti loved to swim and take his daughter to look for seashells.

But that same spring, Spagnoletti clashed with Figueroa, the facilities vice president who handled the Santeria priest’s maintenance contract. They fought about purchases as small as a table, according to a lawsuit she filed against the bank in 2012 alleging gender discrimination. On March 8, Spagnoletti e-mailed Figueroa asking whether she understood that she was supposed to follow his orders. “Do you understand that as a Vice President of this company, you are also expected to always exercise good judgment in the performance of your duties?” he wrote. “YES, ALWAYS HAVE AND ALWAYS WILL,” she replied, according to her lawsuit, which was settled confidentially.

Marisa alleged in her lawsuit that her husband uncovered fraud at Doral, in the form of Figueroa paying vendors for services they didn’t perform and making unauthorized transfers of $30,000 a week to someone. If Spagnoletti knew about Doral’s Santeria circle or the idea that the payments might have been not fraud but a reward for supernaturally assisting the bank, he kept it from his wife. Figueroa, who was fired on May 25, 2011, says she did nothing wrong and doesn’t know anything about the murder. “I’m more anxious than anyone to find out who did it to clean up my name,” she says.

Three weeks after Figueroa’s termination, on the day he was killed, Spagnoletti left work on the early side. Balmas departed later and got stuck in traffic by the bridge. He didn’t think anything of the shattered Lexus on the side of the road.

Around 2 a.m., a colleague called to tell him what had happened. Balmas went to the Spagnolettis’ apartment and found Marisa hysterical, talking about how her husband had been kidnapped. Wakeman had been there, along with other colleagues, and the bank sent armed guards to walk them home. Doral assigned security guards to other top executives, and Wakeman brought guards with him to Spagnoletti’s New Jersey funeral.

As investigations into Spagnoletti’s murder began, Doral struggled. The Puerto Rican economy only got worse, and more of the bank’s loans became worthless. The FDIC wouldn’t give Doral’s balance sheet its seal of approval, and without it, Doral couldn’t get the money it needed to operate. Wakeman tried expanding in the U.S. He moved Doral’s headquarters to Miami in 2013. U.S. operations showed a profit that year, but it wasn’t enough to make up for the deteriorating Puerto Rican portfolio.

In 2014, Puerto Rico created a major crimes unit, headed by Captain Ferdinand Acosta, and he took up the Spagnoletti murder. There weren’t many leads. None of the 911 callers got a good look at the shooter or his vehicle, Acosta says. The murder was definitely not random, but the shooter exhibited poor aim, so he may not have been a professional gunman. Acosta says he started interviewing Doral employees but got word from the FBI to back off. “They prefer to do it alone,” he says.

The FBI’s murder investigation, begun shortly after the 2011 shooting, had expanded to include fraud — just as the widow Spagnoletti had charged. In December 2014 the FBI raided Doral, seizing computers from Wakeman, his secretary, and other executives. In February 2015, Rivera and Figueroa were arrested and charged with fraud. The federal indictment said that Figueroa changed the cleaning company’s contract so that it was getting $24,288.27 every week instead of every month. In all, according to prosecutors, the pair wrongfully took about $2.4 million.

Two days later, on Feb. 25, the FDIC closed Doral’s doors for good. The agency spent $698.4 million making Doral’s depositors whole. Many of the branches, along with the headquarters, were sold to Popular, another Puerto Rican bank. The headquarters building is empty now. A rusty outline remains where the Doral sign used to hang.

Motombo grabbed a woman as a shield. “Don’t do this,” she cried. He started shooting.
Days after the bank failed, Santeria stories surfaced in local newspapers. El Nuevo Día wrote that there had been a ritual with a caiman at the bank. Levis, the founder, went on the radio to joke about it. The failure of Doral is like a “detective novel,” he said. “Not even the caiman could save them at the end.”

When Rivera came to court to plead not guilty to fraud, the proceedings revealed that police had found 10 guns in his home. All were legally registered to him or his wife. Prosecutors said Rivera had been charged with murder once before, in 1983, and was acquitted. He was put under house arrest, with an electronic monitoring bracelet. Figueroa also pleaded not guilty.

Eight months later, in October 2015, the agents looking into Spagnoletti’s murder caught a break: A man on Puerto Rico’s most-wanted list was arrested at San Juan’s airport. He’d worked for Rivera at his janitorial company, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

His name is Yadiel Serrano-Canales, aka Motombo, and, according to prosecutors, he was a member of a gang that dealt cocaine and heroin in San Juan’s Villa Esperanza housing projects. In a court filing, an FBI agent described a June 2012 incident that got Motombo on the most-wanted list. Just after 1 a.m., he and a friend approached three off-duty police officers who were hanging out at a bar across from the projects. After words were exchanged, Motombo left and returned with a gun. “Put down the phone, d---sucker,” Motombo said to one of the officers. The cops pulled out their own guns; Motombo grabbed a nearby woman by her hair, using her as a human shield. “Motombo, don’t do this!” she cried. He fled, firing four times at the police officers, and escaped the island. In 2015 he arranged to return to Puerto Rico and turn himself in.

FBI agents interrogated Motombo for about an hour in a windowless room on the second floor of San Juan’s police headquarters. A person with knowledge of the FBI’s investigation and one of the Puerto Rican police officers say Motombo is suspected of driving Spagnoletti’s shooter. Motombo has not been charged in connection with that. He is in federal custody, facing attempted murder charges for the police shootout. He pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer declined to comment.

In November, Wakeman’s secretary, Vélez, was arrested and charged with perjury for telling the grand jury she didn’t know about the payments to the Santeria priest. Prosecutors say she instructed two Doral employees to pay Rivera weekly rather than monthly. Vélez pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer, Mariela Maestre Cordero, declined to comment.

In April the Doral case took yet another turn. U.S. prosecutors moved to drop the charges against Rivera and Figueroa. They withdrew the indictment “without prejudice,” meaning that they can file new charges with more information if they choose to.

A day after the about-face, I drive to a gated community in a suburb of San Juan to meet Rivera, the person I’d heard so much about. I find a chubby man with a neatly trimmed gray chinstrap beard standing on the porch of a two-story gray stucco house. The Santeria priest is wearing gold bracelets on his wrists and an electronic bracelet on his ankle. Rivera shakes my hand and offers my translator a light. He cuts off my halting attempt to introduce myself in Spanish. “I speak English,” he says, without an accent. Then he tells me to call his lawyer.

His attorney, Carrillo-Jiménez, says her client had nothing to do with Spagnoletti’s murder and that the payments he received were for janitorial services he performed. “People are speculating,” she says. “There is no evidence whatsoever.”

Douglas Leff, the FBI special agent in charge of the San Juan division, held a news conference on June 15, the fifth anniversary of the shooting. He announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, and Marisa offered $10,000 of her own. The authorities are in the final stages of their investigation, he said, and have a great deal of information about the culprits. In an interview, Leff declines to comment on potential suspects. The fraud and murder investigations, he emphasizes, are proceeding on independent tracks. “We’ve been working it very diligently, and we have a lot of momentum,” he says about the murder. “The more digging we do, the more potential avenues we find to work. There may be different people with different levels of culpability.”

When I visit Marisa, she says she has complete faith that the FBI will solve the case. “You need to understand,” she says, “that justice is coming.”

– With Alexander Lopez and Katia Porzecanski

Editors: Nick Summers, Robert Friedman
Development: James Singleton

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-doral-bank-murder/

This post sponsored by Fortress Capital Forex