In an interview to appear tonight on FOX Business Network’s (FBN) Power & Money (9 PM/ET) former Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) speaks with host David Asman about the collapse of MF Global (MF) and the future of MF Global President and former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine. Spitzer said while it is “premature to jump to conclusions” about the legality of Jon Corzine’s actions within MF Global, his political influence will not help him to avoid prosecution. Spitzer said “right now every prosecutor is saying we can prove we are tough by getting Jon Corzine” and he “has a bull’s-eye on his back.” Excerpts from the interview are below, courtesy of Fox Business Network.
On whether Jon Corzine’s political influence will help him to avoid prosecution:
“Just the opposite. Because he is perceived as having influence. Because he is a democrat with a democratic president, he is target number one. Right now every prosecutor is saying we can prove we are tough by getting Jon Corzine. Right now he can’t pick up the phone and say ‘cut me some slack.’ He has a bull’s-eye on his back. There have been stories that in the run up to the debacle, he was calling people at the agencies that oversaw MF Global saying to them ‘we don’t need more capital’ before things fell apart and people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But at this moment he is on the opposite side of that power struggle.”
On the collapse of MF Global and whether Jon Corzine broke the law:
“I think it is premature to jump to conclusions. The overriding issue right now is what happened to the customer money. Did MF use that to cover margin calls, bets they had made on Italian and Greek sovereign debt. Jon is an incredibly smart individual. He made his name on Wall Street. He understood how to place big bets and he has done so very successfully. This is one, at a minimum, that didn’t come up the right way. Perhaps people in the company maybe did something egregiously wrong and a lot of people are out a lot of money.”
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