Monday, August 13, 2012

Marine Links British Bankers to Libor Tax Shelter and Romney's Running-Mate’s Wife

United States Marine and virtual presidential candidate, Field McConnell, has linked the British Bankers Association to Cayman Islands Libor tax shelters and Janna Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running-mate’s wife.

McConnell claims that Mrs. Ryan worked with PwC – a professional associate of the British Bankers’ Association and its Libor panel banker Barclays – to set up Cayman Islands tax shelters designed to conceal profits made by Romney and his colleagues at Bain Capital in serial and abusive Libor-leveraged buy outs of family-owned firms in America.

Feeling laconic, Field McConnell is inviting journalists with Thomson Reuters – the British Bankers Association’s Libor data compiler – to extend the research which they started in the puff piece below, into Mrs. Ryan’s role as a tax attorney with PwC, the British company now positioned to extort Libor concessions from a Romney administration.

"Paul Ryan's wife no stranger to Washington power circles

WASHINGTON (Reuters [the Libor data compiler for the British Bankers’ Association man-in-the middle attacks on America with TARP odious debt]) - Janna Ryan, thrust onto the national stage this weekend when her congressman husband Paul Ryan was named the Republican vice presidential nominee, strikes an appealing image as a stay-at-home mom raising three young children in Wisconsin.

But the 43-year-old has been a Washington operative herself, hailing from a well-connected family and forging an early professional career as a congressional aide and healthcare lobbyist.

Friends describe her as being able to navigate between different worlds -- from small-town Oklahoma and Wellesley College, a private women's college outside Boston that she attended, to complex policy debates in Washington.

"She is very comfortable in and around politics. She grew up in a political family, and it comes very naturally to her," said Leslie Belcher, a Washington lobbyist who worked on Capitol Hill with Ryan and was later one of Ryan's bridesmaids.

During her first public test, Ryan appeared at ease on Saturday as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney introduced her husband at a tightly orchestrated event in Norfolk, Virginia, with the retired battleship USS Wisconsin as the backdrop. She beamed alongside Mitt Romney's wife, Ann Romney, both polished with blonde hair.

Ryan, whose last name was Little before her marriage, grew up in Madill, in southern Oklahoma. Both of her parents spent their careers as lawyers in private practice. Her mother graduated first in her class at the University of Oklahoma law school. A town in Oklahoma, Little City, is named after the family, dating back several generations. Her family has strong Democratic connections, and largely identify with the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of Democratic lawmakers known for being fiscally conservative. Her uncle, David Boren, served as a Democratic governor of Oklahoma and later as senator from the state. Boren's son, Dan Boren, is a member of House of Representatives and as a Blue Dog Democrat, has often voted with Republicans.

After college she worked as a legislative aide to former Oklahoma congressman Bill Brewster, who was a co-founder of the Blue Dog Coalition.

While in that job she worked on transportation and healthcare issues and attended George Washington Law School at night, earning her degree in 1998.

Ryan parlayed her law degree and Hill experience into a lobbyist job, working for several years at Williams & Jensen and at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Her roster of clients included pharmaceutical and insurance clients such as Novartis, Cigna and Blue Cross/Blue Shield, according to lobbying records.

She married Paul Ryan in 2000 after the two met in Washington and moved to his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, where she now raises their three children.

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article in 2000 said their upcoming nuptials would be "depriving Congress of one of its more eligible bachelors."

"They got married eyes wide open, knowing that they wanted to dedicate themselves to public service, and that meant that Janna wouldn't work, and Paul would dedicate himself" to working in Congress, said Jodi Bond, a vice president at the Chamber of Commerce who has been friends with the Ryans for decades.

While the campaign is still sorting out exactly what her role on the campaign trail might be, friends suggested she would be an asset to Romney-Ryan ticket.

"I think she is very relatable," said Missy Edwards, a lobbyist in Washington who became friends with Ryan when they both worked on Capitol Hill together in the 1990s. "She's from a small town, (with) three young kids, smart, and focused on her family, first."

(Reporting by Aruna Viswanatha; Editing by Karey Wutkowski and Cynthia Osterman)”

“What do Barclays, JP Morgan, MF Global and Chesapeake Energy have in common? They are all examples of risk management and audit failures and the auditor of all of them is PricewaterhouseCoopers. Major media has yet to mention the name of PwC, the external auditor, when talking about the Barclays Libor scandal, JP Morgan’s costly “whale” trade, or the woes brought to Chesapeake Energy by its imperial CEO, Aubrey McClendon. There was some mention of PwC early in the MF Global case, but interest in PwC died down quickly as has the general coverage of this scandal as the months wear on. No real truth has come out yet about who has $1.6 billion of customer funds illicitly used to cover CEO Corzine’s risky bets on sovereign debt. According to PCAOB Auditing Standard Number 5, “When auditing internal controls over financial reporting, the auditor may become aware of fraud or possible illegal acts. In such circumstances, the auditor must determine his or her responsibilities under AU sec. 316, Consideration of Fraud in a Financial Statement Audit, AU sec. 317, Illegal Acts by Clients, and Section 10A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.” I’ve written extensively about the auditors responsibility to plan and perform their audit to address the risk of fraud or material misstatement and the auditors responsibility to report up, then possibly out to the SEC when the engagement team becomes aware of fraud or other illegal acts such as Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) violations. During initial planning for the scope of these audits PwC could have decided to do more rather than less. The auditor must increase the scope of the audit and testing if there are higher risks of material misstatements due to fraud or illegal acts. Then, during the audit itself and certainly during the audit of internal controls over financial reporting, PwC could have caught the risk management and internal control failures such as those that we are seeing at Barclays, JP Morgan, MF Global and Chesapeake.”

“PricewaterhouseCoopers (trading as PwC) is a global professional services firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest professional services firm and the largest of the "Big Four" accountancy firms measured by 2011 revenues.

PwC has offices in 771 cities across 158 countries and employs over 169,000 people. It had total revenues of $29.2 billion in FY 2011, of which $14.14 billion was generated by its Assurance practice, $7.63 billion by its Tax practice and $7.46 billion by its Advisory practice. The firm was formed in 1998 by a merger between Coopers & Lybrand and Price Waterhouse. The trading name was shortened to PwC in September 2010 as part of a major rebranding exercise. As of 2010 PwC was the seventh-largest privately owned organization in the United States.”

More to follow.

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