Addressing businessmen in Florida, where financial fraud cases jumped by 42 percent in the last year, FBI Miami Division Special Agent in Charge John Gillies said failures in personal ethics and integrity sowed the initial poisonous seeds of corruption in a society.


I agree.



Gillies, a 27-year veteran of the FBI, called corruption in all its multiple forms, whether in law enforcement or in the judicial system, or involving tax cheats and fraudsters, "our number one criminal threat" in the United States.


I would like to think financial regulation would help here, but if it isn't enforced, it's useless.



He said public corruption investigations by the FBI were "huge" and had increased by more than 20 percent in the last five years, while financial scams -- from securities and hedge fund frauds to Ponzi schemes -- had jumped by more than 25 percent nationwide in the last year alone.



These cases involved hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars.



Florida in particular has been rocked by a number of high-profile Ponzi schemes this year, including fallout from the cases surrounding convicted Wall Street swindler Bernard Madoff and accused Texas financier Allen Stanford.



Gillies' FBI team last week arrested a flamboyant Fort Lauderdale attorney, Scott Rothstein, and charged him with bilking investors out of $1.2 billion in a Ponzi scheme that funded his luxury lifestyle and political largess.


http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5B74AI20091208