Securities And Exchange Commission

R. Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire charged Tuesday with perpetrating an $8-billion investment fraud, cast himself as offshore investment guru to the transatlantic jet set and benefactor to the Caribbean islands' poor through multimillion-dollar promotions of their beloved sport of cricket.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened an investigation into an Orange County real estate lending company that is owned by the husband of a California state assemblywoman. In an e-mail to his firm's roughly 3,000 investors, Point Center Financial Inc. President Dan J. Harkey disclosed that the SEC had subpoenaed records from the firm last week.

Regulators took on the mortgage industry's best-known figure Thursday, accusing former Countrywide Financial Corp. Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo of hiding his alarm about risky loans the company was making at the height of the housing boom while he was reaping nearly $140 million in profits on stock sales.

General Motors Corp. escaped from a federal accounting probe without penalty Thursday when the automaker settled Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that GM's mistakes violated federal laws. The Detroit automaker will not be fined and did not admit or deny wrongdoing.

The top cop at the Securities and Exchange Commission is leaving the government less than a week after receiving an angry dressing-down before Congress over the agency's failure to detect a massive alleged fraud scheme. The SEC said Monday that Linda Thomsen was leaving for the private sector but did not provide details. She has been the agency's enforcement director since May 2005.

Federal regulators on Monday accused Sunwest Management Inc., one of the nation's largest operators of assisted-living facilities, and its former chief executive with securities fraud in connection with real estate investments that turned sour. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced the charges against Sunwest, based in Salem, Ore.

Bank of America Corp. and the Securities and Exchange Commission have become unlikely allies in pressing a federal judge to approve their hoped-for legal settlement over controversial bonuses at Merrill Lynch & Co. Although their rationales differed, each implored U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff on Monday to sign off on the $33-million accord. "The proposed settlement is fair, reasonable, adequate and squarely in the public interest," wrote David Rosenfeld, associate director of the SEC's Manhattan office.

The nation's top securities cop is raising concerns about the rich bonuses that some brokerages routinely offer to lure salespeople from rivals. In an open letter on the Securities and Exchange Commission's website Monday, Chairwoman Mary L. Schapiro warned top brokerage executives that "certain forms of potential compensation may carry with them enhanced risks to customers." Specifically, Schapiro's letter focuses on the risk that brokers lured with bonuses might seek to generate commissions big enough "to justify special arrangements that they have been given."

KB Home, one of the nation's largest home builders, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission "regarding possible accounting and disclosure issues." The investigation opens a fresh round of scrutiny of the company. Its former chief executive, Bruce Karatz, is awaiting trial on federal charges he fraudulently manipulated stock options. In 2006, Karatz resigned after an internal investigation found he had backdated his own stock option grants to increase his pay. In 2008, Karatz agreed to pay more than $7 million to settle SEC charges but didn't admit wrongdoing.

As federal regulators probed Bernard L. Madoff's remarkably consistent investment returns, he was able to brush them off, in part, by claiming a magic touch. "Some people feel the market," he told Securities and Exchange Commission investigators in 2006, 2 1/2 years before his gigantic Ponzi scheme was discovered. "Some people just understand how to analyze the numbers they're looking at." Unfortunately for investors in Madoff's fund, some people at the SEC didn't understand how to analyze his numbers, according to an internal agency review.