Bear Stearns Execs' Trial Offers Look Inside the Financial Meltdown

Two former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers face counts of fraud, conspiracy.

ByABC News
October 12, 2009, 6:28 PM

Oct. 13, 2009— -- The criminal trial of two former Bear Stearns executives, Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, gets under way this week and a lot of people on Wall Street -- and beyond -- are playing close attention.

The high flying money managers are charged with securities fraud and face 20 years in prison if convicted.

In a 28-page indictment, the government alleges that both 53-year-old Cioffi and 47-year-old Tannin knew their hedge funds were "at risk of collapse" but "rather than disclosing the true state of the Funds ... agreed to make misrepresentations in the ultimately futile hope that the Funds' bleak prospects would change."

Those bleak prospects didn't change. The two hedge funds in question were heavily invested in subprime mortgages and eventually lost 100 percent of their value, resulting in a loss to investors of more than a billion dollars.

The alleged false statements and misrepresentations, according to the government, included Tannin telling investors in March 2007 that he was going to add more of his own money to the fund -- although he never did. That alleged false statement encouraged investors to put more money into the fund, according to the indictment, which also alleges that Cioffi never told investors that he was actually transferring $2 million of his own money out of the fund.

In addition, the government alleges that Tannin and Cioffi circumvented the Bear Stearns' email system by using their own personal email accounts and those of their wives.

On April 22, according to the indictment, Tannin recommended in an email to Cioffi that they close the funds. "If we believe the [collateralized debt obligation's report is] ANYWHERE CLOSE to accurate I think we should close the funds now," he allegedly wrote.

And yet both men continued to tell senior Bear Stearns personnel and investors that the Funds "were in good shape and would continue to be successful," the indictment said.

This case has captured the headlines in part because it is intimately tied to the financial crisis and the mortgage meltdown and because investor outrage still runs high.