Invest British Columbia Colombia fraud leads to record 47 million fine (the globe and mail)

Published on 15 December 2010 5 H 27 ESTLast updated 15 December 2010 5 H 39 EST6 comments

British Columbia Colombia investment dealer that target members of a Korean religious community in the province ordered to pay penalties for a total of $ 47 million after a British Columbia Securities Commission Panel ruled that it has committed fraud.

The Commission said Kim Sung Wan (Sean) raised $ 15.7 million 36 investors and has not invested their money in futures and options contracts as promised. Instead of this, most of the money went into his personal bank account, and none was recovered for investors.

"Kim to steal money from investors," the panel hearing BCSC stated in a decision published Wednesday. "He lied about how their funds would be invested and the benefits that they could win."

Sentencing is a record amount for a case of the Commission, stated the Director of the enforcement Lang Evans. But whereas the commission will be "aggressive" try to seize assets to enforce the latter judgment, Mr Evans said that it was unlikely that much can be retrieved to pay the fine.

This is because that most investors ' money has been transferred abroad, until the Commission can freeze accounts, and because Mr. Kim is now in jail in Korea South. He was arrested he after fleeing the Canada and was recently recognized British Colombia fraud guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison. It appeals from conviction.

"This is an outrageous this individual fraud", Mr. Evans said in an interview Wednesday. "And it is a tragic story."

Victims by Mr. Kim came from the Evangelical Church of Korean Foursquare in Vancouver, most of them holding dual nationality Canadian-Korean. Mr. Kim promised yields ranging from 26% to 60% per year on their investments.

In his fraud, he also forged supposed to come from the Commission saying falsely commission monitoring of its business, the Cirplus assistance letters. He also prepared false statements showing the profits earned by the investors.

"All these statements were false," said the Commission. "The investors have received no feedback and each of them have lost their main".

Most investors gave Mr. Kim hundreds of thousands of dollars, and one testified at the hearing, it has invested $ 1.4 million and is now mostly bankrupt.

Commission said that it was not attenuating the case and the Panel has decided that it was appropriate to require by Mr. Kim from "deprive" 15.7 million collected from investors and pay an administrative penalty equal to twice the amount he took his victims or 31.4 million.

Also permanently, it is prohibited to act as Director or officer of a public company or work in the investment industry in the province.

EU’s defects must be addressed for euro survive (the globe and mail)

StockPublished Monday 13 December 2010 taken 2 H 38 ESTLast updated 13 December 2010 3 H 01 EST0 comments

Over this period of last year, the Polish Government is considering an expensive education program to explain the joys of the euro for more than two thirds of the Poles who liked the idea. Politicians thought that they might be willing to register as early as 2012. Today, after more tumultuous year in the brief history of the common currency, Polish policymakers seem no longer hastily to renounce their expensive zloty.

Or whether they are. When the irreducible euro it resurfaced during the Greek crisis last spring with their dire predictions of the possible disappearance of the currency, the most dominant analysts rejected the idea of immediately. But now, as the great European debt crisis lurches in its second year of ardent supporters of the single currency are less certain about its future.

A sign which is the euro area in serious difficulty: repeated assurances of Eurocrats and prominent politicians are ready to make the necessary stabilize currency, to restore the financial health of the region and regain the trust of investors international liaison. As if by chance, they sound as the owner of the team that fully expresses confidence in embattled coach right until the moment the axe falls.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised once more their unwavering support for the euro on Friday. And EU President Herman Van Rompuy stated that any other option would result in "depression and even chaos" in all the Member States.

"If the euro fails, Europe fails," Ms Merkel declaimed after a joint meeting with French and German firms ahead of the euro area, Summit later this week. She spoke of the need to address the fiscal woes of the region and the gap between strong and weak competitiveness.

Structural defects in the region require indeed attention that immediate fire have been developed. But there is an issue of pressing more MS Merkel and boosters euro colleagues appear to be carefully avoided. This would be the continued fragility of ravaged by debt banks region, whose health is at the heart of the current crisis.

The crucial role in the unfolding played by the chronic weakness of the banking system in the second half of 2009 and 2010 early mess has been largely underestimated, explains Nicolas Véron, a researcher Bruegel the elder, the respected Brussels think tank. "If Europe had conducted a serious process marshalling yards, repair and restructuring the banking sector, the shock of the post-Lehman, we probably would be where we are today,", insists m. Véron, an expert on banking and financial regulation.

In other words, likely European could have prevented Greek and Irish - and kept disasters holders flee to exit - if they had not tried to plug the critical problems of their financial institutions. Underlying the subsidies were legitimate fears that banks of the euro area were simply too poorly capitalized to withstand shocks that Greek or Irish default would have unleashed.

However, it is interesting to note that Irish zombie banks were among those who supposedly spent stress tests Bank European early July. While the United States used stress test conclusions to strengthen balance sheets of troubled banks "financial nationalism" rendered unnecessary European tests, says m. Véron.

Famous slogan with donning a European campaign spin then-U.s. presidential candidate Bill Clinton economy: "It is that banks, stupid."

Things, Europe now has little choice but to make dramatic structural changes address banking woes and to obtain public finances in order to embrace his cherished farewell of the common currency.

"More and more, I see the conclusion as one of the two extremes", explains Mr. shockingly due Véron admit. The euro is frayed or EU moves towards a sort of fiscal federalism or integration.

But it will be difficult to win approval by national Governments to beleaguered major institutional reforms, including a pan-European body to cleanse banks fight.

The latter task can be left to individual Governments, partly because of the broad cross-border activity of all but the smallest banks, and that most countries continue to insist on their own institutions. "If everyone else is left to themselves, there are very important not to do anything, incentives", explains Mr. Véron.

It recognizes that there is no precedent for European banks to the supranational level. But there is no precedent for what is happening in Europe. The fact that Europe now faces so radical a choice is a consequence of the crisis would not have been corrected soon enough. »

2010 may go down in history as the year of the attacker (the globe and mail)

10 December 2010 10 H 29 FocusPublished ESTLast updated 10 December 2010 11: 08 PM EST -Michelle Thompson / feedback from the globe and Mail4

It took about five minutes to paralyse the Visa.com. At the time when the Dutch police arrested the boy aged 16, which they say has been responsible for Thursday, the damage had been done. Of course, the boy was not alone. He was assisted by an army of thousands of volunteers. The scary thing: they have been using tools, anyone can get.

If the WikiLeaks dump and subsequent attacks have made very clear, it is this: 2010 belongs to hackers.

Piracy, the practice to get your hands on the tools, systems and materials - especially when he has not permitted – is nothing new: MIT students in the 1950s to "pirates" who manipulated telecommunications systems in the world.

But their impact suddenly has skyrocketed. In the last decade, the digital medium in which operate hackers became single most important driver of cultural, commercial and geopolitical world change. And online members, national security agencies credit card companies were much more than their counterparts in the real world.

Tools easily obtained Cybernetics to be glorified in the novels of Stieg Larsson jailbroken iPhone hacker culture is also bike from the underground to the general public.

"Served to decompose into networks and pull data classified, but back in the day that this information was kept within the community, hackers", explains Michael Calce, which, under the pseudonym of Mafiaboy, becomes one of the most famous computer criminals in the world a decade ago when he was able to decrease temporarily websites of several companies, including Yahoo and CNN.

"Now that the information is on a pedestal world." WikiLeaks is that an example, there is much more of this to come.

STATE ISSUES

The largest breach of a U.S. military computer network ever, according to the Deputy Secretary of Defense William III's Lynn j., took place in 2008.

"He started when infected flash drive was inserted in the u.s. based in the Middle East, military laptop" m. Lynn wrote in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. "Malicious computer code flash, by a foreign intelligence agency drive downloaded itself over a network managed by the u.s. central command."

For the first time, a senior government official has confirmed what was most security experts already strongly suspected - United States in constant attacks foreign enemies, and some of these attacks had succeeded intrusive information some of computer networks more sensitive in Washington.

In recent years, Western nations much of their efforts on security policies turned to computer networks conscious of the fact that a growing number of malicious, actors minor criminals at the featured State "patriotic hackers," constantly bend on networks of Government for weaknesses. United States Barack Obama President has created a new Office of the White House to deal with cyber security. Earlier this year, a group of 15 countries, including the United States, China and the Russia agreed in principle to work on the limitation of cyber-attacks.

In 2007, critical infrastructure Estonia, including banks and broadcasters, computers came under attack. In this case, the pro-Russian included guilty "patriotic hackers", but also extensive networks computers maliciously co-opted everywhere in the world, including the users had no idea that they helped an act of war.

Duplication of bodies of State, multinational corporations and the pirates without borders has become a theme of 2010. Canadian BlackBerry - maker Research In Motion has seen many of its markets overseas at risk this year after Governments India, Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates Arab United threatened to ban blackberries unless they were given access to the information passing through the devices. Google has been sponsored by the State piracy in China, something the hangar cables helped WikiLeaks light on. Indeed, the increasing popularity of cloud computing - hosting data and software on the servers of third parties that are accessible from any where in the world - have only increased the potential reward for anyone who is able to penetrate the servers of companies such as Google or Amazon.

High data rates China’s points of interest more rises (the globe and mail)

Chinese imports and exports jumped in November, bank loans topped forecasts and investment property powered ahead of time, a series of numbers which could pave the way to the Central Bank raise interest rates at this weekend.

Robust data released Friday also offered a double dose of good news for the world economy: a reminder that China's application was even faster and indication that recoveries American and European have been picking up steam.

China has been slow to tighten monetary policy, this year, partly due to fear of a double dip recession in the developed countries.

But with China's inflation running at its fastest clip for more than two years, analysts are now in the quest for the second global release a more aggressive mix of rate increases, the currency loan restrictions and more reserve requirements for banks.

"Every angle, the case of additional liquidity and the credit crunch as well as rate hikes and appreciation are strong enough, said Tao Wang, Economist of UBS to Beijing."

In the meantime, another strong month for China's trade surplus could in international critical cost of its exchange rate regime. The United States and Europe say that an undervalued currency gives exporters an unfair advantage on world markets.

November imports rose 37.7 per cent from a year earlier, easily topping forecasts for increased by 24.2%, propelled by voracious appetite China products.

Chinese imports have developed a habit in the last two years of surprise on the upside. In this regard, jumping from 34.9 per cent in exports, above expectations of the market for a 22.0% increase has been the biggest surprise.

"The increase in exports appears to be dictated by just ahead of the holiday season rush orders" Mingchun Sun and Kevin Lai, Daiwa, capital market economists said in a note.

Evidence from this point of view was the fact that final goods markets such as Europe and the United States exceeded those of intermediate goods to Asia.

"It remains to be seen, well understood, if it can be maintained,"they added.""

The United States exports increased 32.2%, while shipments to the EU, most major trading partner China climbed from 33.8 per cent. The increase in exports China left with a surplus of juicy $ 22.9 billion (US) in November, the seventh month of trade performance right impressive. During this stretch, its average surplus was $ 22.2 billion.

Data on trade stimulated the main index of Chinese stock of 1.1% even if investors remain cautious ahead of inflation to be released during the weekend data. Shanghai index was flat before the publication of data.

Even without criticism of its main trading partners of the West, rising inflation in China could exert pressure on the rise on the yuan.

"Trade surplus data arrives at a time when domestic inflation is on the rise, indicating that the pace of appreciation of the yuan against the dollar could speed up next year," said Lu Zhengwei, an economist at the Industrial Bank in Shanghai.

Prices of Chinese consumers may hit 5.1% in the year in November, a top support, State of 28 months reported Friday. Wide M2 as China pink money 19.5% in November of the previous year, while banks extended 564 billion yuan ($84.7 billion in new loans in local currency in November, the Central Bank said. The two issues have been slightly ahead of expectations.

Banks have already beaten on year-round loan quota 7.5 trillion yuan set by the Government.

"Total lending will certainly exceed 8 trillion yuan this year, which will open the way for the Central Bank to adopt measures more clamping in the future", says Gao Shanwen, Chief Economist at the essence of the securities in Beijing.

"We expect at least an interest rate more increase this year, and the move could come soon", he added.

Friday, the Chinese leadership has opened three day Conference work economic centre, a gathering where they will establish the strategic direction for the next year.

Office of policy, governing body of the Communist Party, set the tone of the meeting last week when he announced a shift in "prudent" position "properly loose" monetary policy over the past two years.

Separate data, the National Bureau of statistics said real estate edged up 0.3% in November from a month earlier, while the real estate investment increased by 36.7% one year earlier. The real estate sector focused much of China tightening this year, with the Government determined to extricate the speculation.

Analysts said that the floating figures should help ease concerns about the possibility of collateral damage to the economy measures for cooling in the inflamed housing market.