FULL SENTINEL RULING LINK – ANN BARNHARDT

Background: Sentinel Group used and lost their clients’ segregated assets but a judge has ruled that the bank is not guilty of stealing people’s private property as outlined below. This is the third such theft: MF Global and PFG Best were the other two companies guilty of stealing their clients’ assets. The bottom line is that your assets are being used and lost without your consent. There is not much left to a Republic with allows the theft of personal assets with no consequences. Get your money out of the stock markets now.

David DeGerolamo

A reader with a Westlaw subscription downloaded this and then emailed it to me. Many thanks for that, as it is NOT published on the internet. Until now. Mwah-ha-ha-ha.

This commentary came from the fellow who sent this to me. I think it is spot-on.

Miss Barnhardt,

I thought you might be interested in reading the actual opinion of the In Re Sentinel Group case, which I have attached in PDF. It was very hard to find for some reason, and I had to access my Westlaw account in order to get it. I think it would be well worth your time to read it, as I am afraid that it appears to confirm what you have been saying.

The entire case reads like an after-the-fact rationalization of a predetermined conclusion. Years ago when I was with a different firm, I worked on numerous major institutional fraud and auditing cases, and I cannot recall a ruling even remotely similar – let alone from a federal court of appeals.

Please pay particular attention to the section on equitable subordination, on pages 6 through 8. Unbelievably, the court acknowledged in that section that even though some of the bankers lied under oath during the trial, that fact did not prove “sufficiently egregious” actions on the part of the bank.

I will quote the opinion: “Instead of finding that their testimony [i.e. their lies] justified a finding of egregious bank behavior, the district court essentially found that the bank officials were such artless liars that they couldn’t have been concealing deliberate wrongdoing.” See page 7, column 2.

So in other words, a U.S. Court of Appeals has found that if a banker lies under oath during a trial, that fact proves that the bank was innocent of any misconduct with respect to the subject matter of those lies. Did we get transported to bizarro world without knowing it?