CV05-00030 - U.S. Dept of Justice, Office of the U.S. Trustee, David C. Farmer, Trustee vs. Harmon

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

CV05-00030 DAE KSC

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

Judges: David A. Ezra; Kevin S. Chang

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DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

Herbert M. Allison

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Herbert M. Allison, Jr. (born 1943) was appointed as President and Chief Executive Officer of Fannie Mae in September 2008 by Director James Lockhart of Federal Housing Finance Agency, as conservator of Fannie Mae.

Prior to being appointed to Fannie Mae, he was Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of TIAA-CREF from 2002 until his retirement in 2008.

He began his professional career in 1971 as an associate in the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch in New York. After postings in Paris, Tehran and London, Mr. Allison served at various times as Treasurer, Director of Human Resources, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President for the Investment Banking, Equity and Debt Divisions before being elected President, Chief Operating Officer and a member of the Board of Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., in 1997.

After leaving Merrill Lynch in mid-1999, he served as National Finance Chairman for U.S. Senator John McCain's first Presidential Campaign.

From 2000 to 2002, Mr. Allison was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Alliance for Lifelong Learning, Inc., a joint venture of Oxford, Stanford and Yale Universities, offering online, college-level courses to adults.

Allison is a director of Time Warner Inc., and a member of the Advisory Board of the Yale School of Management, the Advisory Council of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's International Advisory Committee.

He was a director of the New York Stock Exchange from 2003-2005. In recent years Mr. Allison also chaired the Business-Higher Education Forum and the Vietnam Education Foundation and served on the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Roundtable, recently served on the Board of Directors of The Conference Board, the Board of Trustees of The Economic Club of New York, the New York State Commission to Modernize the Regulation of Financial Services, the New York State Commission on Education Reform and the Council of Graduate Schools Advisory Committee.

Allison earned a B.A. in philosophy from Yale University. Following four years as an officer in the U.S. Navy, including a year in Vietnam, he received an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_M._Allison"

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April 17, 2009

Fannie Mae CEO to Run Bank Bailout

By JIM KUHNHENN, AP

WASHINGTON (April 17) - The White House turned to an experienced former investment banker Friday to run the federal government's $700 billion bank rescue effort, selecting the head of mortgage giant Fannie Mae as an assistant Treasury secretary.

Herbert Allison Jr., Fannie Mae's president and CEO, will replace Neel Kashkari, a holdover from the Bush administration.

Allison, who must be confirmed by the Senate, would bear the title of assistant Treasury secretary for financial stability and counselor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

He would be in charge of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the fund that has injected billions of dollars into banks in hopes of unclogging credit. He would inherit a program that has been sharply criticized in Congress and which banks have come to view warily because of the restrictions attached to receipt of its funds.

President Barack Obama's administration has been slowly filling Treasury positions, hindered by candidates who have either withdrawn from consideration or been caught up in the vetting process.

Fannie Mae, seized by federal regulators in September, is closely overseen by federal regulators, making the chief executive's job tough to fill in the private sector. The company, therefore, appears likely to turn to an insider as Allison's replacement.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Fannie Mae was expected to name Michael J. Williams, the company's chief operating officer and a longtime executive as Allison's replacement. Fannie Mae declined to comment.

Allison's selection presents the administration with yet another challenge. If Allison is confirmed, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be without chief executives. David Moffett, formerly Freddie Mac's CEO, resigned in March.

In Allison, the White House selected a former Merrill Lynch investment banker who became chairman of the retirement fund manager TIAA-CREF. Allison served as finance chief for John McCain's 2000 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. But politically, Allison has shown himself to be bipartisan in his allegiances, contributing to both Democrats and Republicans, according to Federal Election Commission records.

Since taking over in September at Fannie Mae, where he took no salary, Allison, the son of an FBI agent, developed a reputation for open-mindedness with consumer advocates, even those who have had an a contentious relationship with the giant company.

"Mr. Allison is well-positioned to lead the TARP," said Scott Talbott, chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry group. "He has a wealth of experience with buying, selling, protecting, and managing assets to protect the taxpayer investment and strengthen the economy."

Some industry officials said that by pulling Allison away from Fannie Mae, the White House was signaling that TARP would remain a viable component of the government's stabilization efforts for the financial industry, even in the face of hostile lawmakers and wary bankers.

Bert Ely, a banking industry consultant, said Allison has the advantages of being a known quantity to the Obama administration who is "much more of a financial heavyweight" than Kashkari.

Plus, he said, the new job would likely be more of a challenge than running Fannie and Freddie, which have been operating under tight government oversight since last September. "In this new situation, he's going to be much more of a policy maker," Ely said. "I can understand why he would want to take it."

http://money.aol.com/article/fannie-mae-ceo-new-bailout-chief/433738

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NEW DISCOVERY (04/17/09); More undisclosed conflicts of interest between David Farmer, Ben Cayetano, Earl Anzai, Lyn Anzai, Robin Campaniano, Edward Liddy, Goldman Sachs, Barack Obama, Henry Paulson, The Nature Conservancy, The Hawaii Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, Suzanne Case, Peter Savio, Faye Kurren, Haunani Apoliona, OHA, Robert Rubin, Kamehameha Schools, Nathan Aipa, Bishop Museum, William Simon, HonFed, Investors Equity Life Insurance Co., Bank of Hawaii, Central Pacific Bank, Colbert Matsumoto, Dan Inouye, AIG, CV Starr, Hank Greenberg, ACE Insurance, Ace Greenberg, Chubb Group, Marsh & McLennan, Rocco Sansone, Mercer Consulting, Aloha Airlines, Bill Clinton, Yucaipa, Hawaiian Airlines, Douglas Ing, Henry Peters, Judge Rey Graulty, Judge Barry Kurren, Judge Robert Faris, Herbert Allison, etc:

April 17, 2009

A.I.G. Chief Owns Significant
Stake in Goldman

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH, New York Times

Edward M. Liddy, the dollar-a-year chief executive leading the American International Group since its bailout last fall, still owns a significant stake in Goldman Sachs, one of the insurer’s trading partners that was made whole by the government bailout of A.I.G.

Mr. Liddy earned most of his holdings in Goldman, worth more than $3 million total, as compensation for serving on the bank’s board and its audit committee until he stepped down in September to take the job at A.I.G. He moved to A.I.G. at the request of Henry M. Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary and a former Goldman director.

Details about his holdings were disclosed in Goldman’s proxy statement and confirmed by an A.I.G. spokeswoman, who said they constituted “a small percentage of his total net worth.” Mr. Liddy had already owned some stock in Goldman Sachs before joining its board in 2003.

He has said that he considers his work at A.I.G. to be a public service, performed on behalf of the taxpayers, who ended up with nearly 80 percent of the insurance company. His goal is to dismantle the company and sell its operating units, using the proceeds to pay back the rescue loans. On Thursday, A.I.G. said it had sold its car insurance unit, 21st Century Insurance, to the Zurich Financial Services Group for $1.9 billion.

Along the way, Mr. Liddy has clearly disclosed that A.I.G. was serving as a conduit, with much of the rescue money passing through and ending up in the hands of A.I.G.’s trading partners.

Goldman has said in the past that it had collateral and hedges to reduce the risk of its exposure to A.I.G.

Still, his stake could represent a potential conflict and is likely to reignite questions about Goldman’s involvement in A.I.G., and about why taxpayer money was used to shield A.I.G.’s trading partners from losses, when asset values plunged everywhere and most investors suffered greatly.

Had A.I.G. simply declared bankruptcy, the financial institutions doing business with it would have ended up in court, as they did in the case of Lehman Brothers, fighting to get pennies on the dollar for their claims.

Instead, Goldman Sachs received $13 billion of the Federal Reserve’s rescue money to close out various contracts it had outstanding with A.I.G. It was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the government rescue.

A spokeswoman for A.I.G., Christina Pretto, dismissed any suggestion that Mr. Liddy’s financial ties to Goldman might have shaped his actions at A.I.G.

“A.I.G. is a large institution that engages in standard commercial activity with companies all over the world,” Ms. Pretto said. “These activities are handled in the normal, day-to-day course of business and rarely, if ever, rise to the level of the C.E.O.”

She said in particular that Mr. Liddy was not involved in the discussions of how to close out the contracts of A.I.G.’s counterparties in derivatives and other forms of trading.

“Discussions regarding these matters were handled exclusively by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” Ms. Pretto said.

According to Goldman’s proxy, Mr. Liddy holds 18,244 units of restricted stock, which would be worth about $2.2 million if they were sold at today’s market price. The rest of his holdings are in common stock. Restricted stock cannot be sold without incurring significant tax penalties, but the proxy said that Mr. Liddy’s restricted units would be converted to common shares on May 9.

Officials at the Fed, which initiated the bailout of A.I.G. last September, have said they were not happy about having to pour public resources into private sector companies, but felt that they had to do so to avoid a chain of losses at financial institutions all over the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/business/17liddy.html?_r=1&em

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March 14, 2009

A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses
After $170 Billion Bailout

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and PETER BAKER, New York Times

WASHINGTON — The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said.

But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them.

The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance.

The payment of so much money at a company at the heart of the financial collapse that sent the broader economy into a tailspin almost certainly will fuel a popular backlash against the government’s efforts to prop up Wall Street. Past bonuses already have prompted President Obama and Congress to impose tough rules on corporate executive compensation at firms bailed out with taxpayer money.

A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled. In a letter to Mr. Geithner, Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., said at least some bonuses were needed to keep the most skilled executives.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.

Still, Mr. Liddy seemed stung by his talk with Mr. Geithner, calling their conversation last Wednesday “a difficult one for me” and noting that he receives no bonus himself. “Needless to say, in the current circumstances,” Mr. Liddy wrote, “I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them.”

An A.I.G. spokeswoman said Saturday that the company had no comment beyond the letter. The bonuses were first reported by The Washington Post.

The senior government official, who was not authorized to speak on the record, said the administration was outraged. “It is unacceptable for Wall Street firms receiving government assistance to hand out million-dollar bonuses, while hard-working Americans bear the burden of this economic crisis,” the official said.

Of all the financial institutions that have been propped up by taxpayer dollars, none has received more money than A.I.G. and none has infuriated lawmakers more with practices that policy makers have called reckless.

The bonuses will be paid to executives at A.I.G.’s financial products division, the unit that wrote trillions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps that protected investors from defaults on bonds backed in many cases by subprime mortgages.

The bonus plan covers 400 employees, and the bonuses range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $6.5 million. Seven executives at the financial products unit were entitled to receive more than $3 million in bonuses.

Mr. Liddy, whom Federal Reserve and Treasury officials recruited after A.I.G. faltered last September and received its first round of bailout money, said the bonuses and “retention pay” had been agreed to in early 2008 and were for the most part legally required.

The company told the Treasury that there were two categories of bonus payments, with the first to be given to senior executives. The administration official said Mr. Geithner had told A.I.G. to revise them to protect taxpayer dollars and tie future payments to performance.

The second group of bonuses covers some 2008 retention payments from contracts entered into before government involvement in A.I.G. Indeed, in his letter to Mr. Geithner, Mr. Liddy wrote that he had shown the details of the $450 million bonus pool to outside lawyers and been told that A.I.G. had no choice but to follow through with the payment schedule.

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

But the official said the administration will force A.I.G. to eventually repay the cost of the bonuses to the taxpayers as part of the agreement with the firm, which is being restructured.

A.I.G. did cut other bonuses, Mr. Liddy explained, but those were part of the compensation for people who dealt in other parts of the company and had no direct involvement with the derivatives.

Mr. Liddy wrote that A.I.G. hoped to reduce its retention bonuses for 2009 by 30 percent. He said the top 25 executives at the financial products division had also agreed to reduce their salary for the rest of 2009 to $1.

Ever since it was bailed out by the government last fall, A.I.G. has been defending itself against accusations that it was richly compensating people who caused one of the biggest financial crises in American history.

A.I.G.’s main business is insurance, but the financial products unit sold hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of derivatives, the notorious credit-default swaps that nearly toppled the entire company last fall.

A.I.G. had set up a special bonus pool for the financial products unit early in 2008, before the company’s near collapse, when problems stemming from the mortgage crisis were becoming clear and there were concerns that some of the best-informed derivatives specialists might leave. It locked in a total amount, $450 million, for the financial products unit and prepared to pay it in a series of installments, to encourage people to stay.

Only part of the payments had been made by last fall, when A.I.G. nearly collapsed. In documents provided to the Treasury, A.I.G. said it was required to pay about $165 million in bonuses on or before Sunday. That is in addition to $55 million in December.

Under a deal reached last week, A.I.G. agreed that the top 50 executives would get half of the $9.6 million they were supposed to get by March 15. The second half of their bonuses would be paid out in two installments in July and in September. To get those payments, Treasury officials said, A.I.G. would have to show that it had made progress toward its goal of selling off business units and repaying the government.

The financial products unit is now being painstakingly wound down.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15AIG.html?th&emc=th

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September 16, 2008

NIGHTMARE ON WALL STREET

Isle experts expect
wave of recession

Economists say the Wall Street crisis will likely
damage Hawaii’s delicate economy

By Kristen Consillio, Star-Bulletin. Calling it a once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis, local finance experts expect the national market meltdown to lead to a recession in Hawaii.

"It's hard to see what could be the worst financial crisis in at least the last 50 years and have it not precipitate into something like a recession," said Neil Rose, chief investment officer of Honolulu-based Cadinha & Co. "We don't see this as a quick bottom - it's going to take some time to figure out exactly who is tied to these financial institutions."

Though far from Hawaii's shores, turmoil on Wall Street with the same-day news of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s bankruptcy, Bank of America Corp.'s acquisition of Merrill Lynch & Co. and AIG Hawaii parent American International Group Inc.'s plea for emergency funds is expected to exacerbate declining consumer confidence.

The state's lead tourism industry, already reeling from a sharp drop in visitors, is expected to spiral even further since it is tied to consumer spending and a healthy economy. Also of significant concern is the local housing market, which hinges on borrowing and financing for land development - a sector that is already struggling to make deals happen.

"We already predicted job losses for two years; that's a recession, and this can't do anything but make it worse," said Carl Bonham, an economist with the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization. "It's bad, there's absolutely no doubt about that."

UHERO, which is set to release an updated economic forecast this week, predicted in June job losses of 0.2 percent for both 2008 and 2009.

While Hawaii has held up better than most areas on the mainland, the state is still extremely vulnerable to outside factors, evidenced by isle foreclosures, which jumped 132 percent year-over-year in August.

To some extent, Hawaii is already seeing the effects of a recession, including increased bankruptcies, the demise of longtime businesses and mass layoffs statewide, according to finance experts.

"I don't think we're going into a depression, but we'll probably have a recession; no doubt about that," said Richard Dole, chief executive of Honolulu-based Dole Capital LLC, a specialty private equity investment banking firm.

"It's really a crisis of confidence," he said. "If people don't have a lot of confidence on the mainland, they're certainly not coming here. Foreign markets are suffering, too."

Paul Brewbaker, Bank of Hawaii's chief economist, said isle consumers should not worry too much about the upheaval among some of Wall Street's largest players.

"The losses in this kind of financial market turbulence are not the kind of things that retail consumers are exposed to, unless they're shareholders," Brewbaker said. "The thing to remember is that the capital markets, as a whole, are secure, although a number of firms have experienced losses severe enough to put them out of business."

Some investors are concerned that AIG's problems could spill over to other companies that do business with the firm.

"The way we look at it is, as far as we know, the insurance side of our operation is fine," said Robin Campaniano, president and chief executive officer of AIG Hawaii, which wrote nearly $120 million in premiums for fiscal 2008. "The nature of our problems have less to do with the performance of our insurance portfolio than the credit and the real estate markets."

http://starbulletin.com/2008/09/16/news/story01.html

For more, GO TO > > > AIG: The Un-American Insurance Group

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NEW DISCOVERY (09-16-08):

Googling for...

AIG and
The Philippine Connection

www.kycbs.net/Google-AIG-PI.htm

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NEW DISCOVERY (04-22-08): David Farmer’s undisclosed connections with AIPAC and “Hank” Greenberg:

From Exhibit: “CONNECTING THE DIRTY DOTS TO AIPAC”:

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

CV05-00030 DAE KSC

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

Judges: David A. Ezra; Kevin S. Chang

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DEFENDANT’S EXHIBIT

—

A few words of explanation:

In his "MEMORANDUM IN OPPOSITION TO DEBTOR'S MOTION FOR ORDER TO DISAPPROVE APPOINTMENT OF DAVID C. FARMER AS SUCCESSOR TRUSTEE", filed with the Court on August 24, 2007, the Trustee's attorney, Steven Guttman, Esq., of the law firm, Kessner Umebayashi Bain & Matsunaga, stated to the Court:

"... Harmon is once again attempting to create issues of conflict where none exist by attempting to draw connections between phantom dots."...

Mr. Guttman does not elaborate beyond this simple statement of HIS PERSONAL OPINION, as to WHICH of the thousands of connections I have cited that he wishes the Court to accept, without question, as being merely "phantom dots". In other court filings, Mr. Guttman has characterized my Motions as consisting of "conspiracy theories" -- again with no specific references.

Despite these unnamed "phantom dots" and "conspiracy theories", the Court has blithely and unquestionably gone along with Mr. Guttman's opinions and has repeatedly denied ALL Motions that I have made. In fact, both Courts involved have ruled that the Court Clerk shall not accept any future filings from me without the Courts' prior approval - which it has repeatedly declined to give.

Therefore, due to the fact that I continue to discover new, material FACTS almost daily, I am preparing a set of NEW EXHIBITS in which I intend to document the financial, professional, personal, and political connections between the many various entities involved in this case.

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The following is a listing of named witnesses in this case who have factual connections with AIPAC. Each underlined name has been linked to a detailed description of that witness to enable the Court to more easily CONNECT THE DOTS TO...

AIPAC

Investors Equity Insurance Company

Reliance Insurance Group