Report on the Lehman-related Securities (12)

IV. Banking Supervision defers to Bankers’ Arrogances

 

In order to understand a scam that deceived ten of thousands of victims over a period of six years in an industry that is subject to additional two-fold regulations, one has to be wary of the pitfall of mono-causality. The ‘piggybacked structure’ design with an appealing but deceptive façade is only the fuel. By itself, the destructive fire would not come into being. It takes the willful blindness of the SFC in approving the prospectuses and the indulgence of the HKMA towards the distributor banks to provide the heat and oxygen that cause and sustain the fire for as long as it did.

 

Like the SFC, the HKMA also produced its report about the scam and submitted it to the government (available at www.info.gov.hk/hkma/eng/new/lehman/lehman_report.htm). Again like the SFC Report, the ‘Report of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority on Issues Concerning the Distribution of Structured Products Connected to Lehman Group Companies’ is an undated piece of shoddy work without any person or department within the organization wishes to be responsible for it.

 

As the HKMA had been indulgent towards the banks while they put the scam into action, it is hardly surprising that its Report is nothing but a self-serving forward-looking statement. In order to gross over the most crucial issue of ‘suitability assessment’ that directly concerns the banks, the Report has to circumvent the core of the scam, namely the ‘piggybacked structure’ and its deceptive façade. This proves to be the achilles heel of the SFC and the HKMA. While the purported exposition of ‘minibond’ in the SFC Report is merely an exercise of plagiarism, the equivalent in the HKMA Report is an amalgam of irrelevance, superficiality and trickery. The HKMA devotes about 4 pages of its 85-page Report to answer the question ‘what are Lehman structured products?’ The answer is a total shambles and it is difficult to make any sense of it but we will try nonetheless.

 

First of all, the HKMA advises that the Lehman-related securities ‘can be broadly grouped into five categories as set out in Table 1’ (para. 2.2 emphasis original). Table 1 is divided into 5 columns under the headings of (i) Category, (ii) Issuer and Arranger, (iii) Issue dates, (iv) Amount involved, (v) Remarks. The ‘remarks’ consist of seeming summaries of how the products work which, as one would appreciate from the exposition about the products in chapter 2, is an evidently futile attempt that is bound to be neither informative nor conducive to any useful purposes.

 

So, what is the basis of categorization used by the HKMA? To illustrate the folly of this part of the Report, the categories used in the Report are shown below:

- Credit-linked notes where LBHI is not a reference entity (Minibonds)

- Equity-linked notes (Pyxis Notes)

- Fund-linked notes (ProFund Notes)

- Credit-linked notes where LBHI is a reference entity (Constellation Structured Retail Notes) (Retail-Aimed Callable Investment Notes) (Octave Notes)

- Private placements

Even a casual glance of this list of categorization will alert the reader that the HKMA focused only on the façade of the Lehman-related securities. Although the prospectuses only mention the ‘hidden component’ in a very sketchy manner, the HKMA staff is among the top of professionals in the industry and one needs look no further for proof of this claim than at the remuneration of Mr. Joseph Yam and his immediate lieutenants. Their packages of remuneration definitely stand head and shoulder above their counterparts elsewhere in the world. As such, they should feel some gratitude towards the Hong Kong public for their trust and generosity. But, like the SFC, the Hong Kong taxpayers are also short-changed by the HKMA as evidenced in its Report. 

to be continued......
Extract From: "Exposure - the Truth About Lehman-HSBC Fraud"