Enron Corp never disclosed key elements about the structure of oil and gas transactions that are now at the heart of a fraud trial between JP Morgan Chase & Co and 11 insurers, an agent for the insurers testified.
JP Morgan has sued the insurers to force them to pay US$1 billion on six surety bonds backing oil and gas trades between Enron and an offshore entity sponsored by the bank, Mahonia Ltd.
The insurers refused to pay after Enron's collapse, saying the bank tricked them into backing loans, not commodity trades.
Houston-based insurance agent Philip Bair testified that he was a conduit between Enron and the insurers. Bair told jurors that Enron officials never told him that Mahonia would sell the commodities to JP Morgan or that the No. 2 US bank would sell them back to the now-bankrupt energy trader.
Bair said that before the insurers underwrote one transaction in 1998, Enron official Guy Hoffman only told him about the sales from the energy trader to Mahonia. "He essentially told me that Chase would be lending the value of the contract" to Mahonia, he said.
A lawyer for the insurers, Celia Barenholtz, asked Bair if Enron told him about the other legs of the transactions.
"Absolutely not," said Bair, who works at John L. Wortham & Son LLP.
Bair, who signed the six bonds on behalf of the surety companies, was the first witness for the insurers after JP Morgan completed its case yesterday in a civil trial that began Dec. 2.
The insurers claim the bank defrauded the insurers by failing to disclose that Enron would buy back the commodities it sold. The insurers claim that those circular transactions amounted to loans, and New York law bars insurers from backing loans. The law allows them to underwrite commodities trades.
A central issue at the trial has been whether the insurers knew the true nature of the transactions and went ahead with the surety bonds anyway, as JP Morgan alleges. JP Morgan has said the bank's transactions with Enron are under investigation by the US Justice Department, the SEC, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Morgenthau has begun a grand jury investigation of JP Morgan's relationship with Mahonia, which is based in the Isle of Jersey and handled billions of dollars of gas and oil trades with Enron, people familiar with the case said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained