Barry Tannenbaum suckers South Africans into massive R10 billion Ponzi Scheme

Update 06/07/09: Tannenbaum admits Ponzi - "I accept that I have an obligation to make full restitution to Barwa for all sums that have been wrongfully diverted or retained."

SHOOT: Barry Tannenbaum = our own Bernard Madoff/Robert Maxwell/Maurice "Hank" Greenberg. Are these Jewish names? Just curious.

Update on the 'Jewishness' of Barry Tannebaum:

Barry is the famously pious son of Harold Tannenbaum, mega-rich son of one of the founders of Adcock Ingram, South Africa's second-largest pharmaceutical company.

By 'famously pious' I understand that to mean, colloquially, that is is well known, or commonly understood that a particularly person is dedicated in their religion [in this case Judaism], well known by their community, to be:

- practiced or used in the name of real or pretended religious motives, or for some ostensibly good object; falsely earnest or sincere: a pious deception
- of or pertaining to religious devotion; sacred rather than secular: pious literature.
- having or showing appropriate respect or regard for parents or others.

Doesn't it make sense to use religion which is based on 'good faith' to dupe the maximum possible number of people of the maximum possible amount of money? And of course those who are being conned are conned for exactly the same motives as the person doing the conning - sheer greed.

Update on 20/06/09: Another schemer - fleeced $7 billion.

Update on 16/06/09: Today I added Hank Greenberg to this list of mega thiefs/ponzi schemers. He was the ex-CEO of AIG, the world's biggest reinsurance bank.

Update on 13/06/09: I've had quite a lot of response to what was initially a very simple post (see above). Just two sentences appended to the clip below. I've since inserted the Bernard Madoff link and added Robert Maxwell. I've also gone to the trouble to see what Semitic people are writing about these individuals. And as one could expect, there is a sense of wanting to ostracise and excommunicate.

What seems to me to be strange in all these cases is there is still no accounting for the money. Someone pleads guilty or commits suicide, but billions remain mysteriously lost. One would assume someone benefits, and aren't the most likely candidates the immediate families of these criminals? If there was a real sense of shame or accountability, moneys would be restored in totum. Is anyone pursuing this? If the argument is that the entire sum cannot be accounted for, then those sums that can (that must appear in bank accounts), those sums that partly account for these schemes should be used. Does this happen? Once again, just curious.

This comment from Henry Cave sums up the question:

He [Madoff] won. The money has not been accounted for much less recovered. His wife and kids benefit from the crime and are not forced to return anything, and we have no idea where else or with whom Bernie may have stashed billions of dollars. It's like having a confession of a murder but no dead body and no record of where the estate of the deceased has gone.

The response to this post seems to answer the original question. And for asking it I've been receiving hatemail, anonymous of course, like this one today:

sa2to@aol.com: Nick, you're a racist anti-semitic asshole.
The email seems to have been set up simply for name-calling purposes. When you respond it turns out 550 550 MAILBOX NOT FOUND. It's an odd response when the Jewish community themselves are asking much fiercer questions.

But this much is obvious - during a time of protracted economic hardship, ordinary people, whoever they are, will be less tolerant of these sort of schemes. Or the glib response to them. The temptation to jump to conclusions, to go ape-shit and vent their anger will simply grow as more of the middle class lose their homes, their cars, their jobs. In such a scenario, you really don't want a string of perpetrators to emerge that have anything in common. Because when the greenback hits the fan, and it is, someone is going to be blamed. Political leaders, The Rich, The Fed, Capitalism, Bankers, [____________indicate your preferred candidate here].

Personally, I blame greed. Everyone is complicit, each consumer is filled with self-interest. Any person with a car, a house, television, phone, who earns a salary, who is part of a 'market' has become part of a psychology of rampant consumption. We are the problem. Greed is bad. And we're about to find out as we enter a phase of collapse, and what the Jeremiah James Kunstler calls The Long Emergency (a time of converging catastrophes). It all sounded like alarmist doomsaying. Everyone was too busy getting rich and having their pupils reconfigured into dollar signs to take any of the signals - about the environment, about energy, about how disgusting our self indulgent, materially obsessed lifestyles had become. No one stepped back, thought critically for a moment, and said, Hang on - maybe we shouldn't be doing this. Maybe it's morally wrong. Maybe it's also fundamentally wrong.

And those who did, worried that they would get left behind by those who weren't, and got caught up in the treadmill again.

With overshoot (economic and ecological), you get systemic collapse. And the more integrated a system, the more widespread the collapse. It doesn't just revert to equilibrium, it's a severe die off, a severe pullback. You go from an abundance to scarcity in a twinkle. That's a fundamental threat to ourselves. We might say that greed is a blasphemy against our own survival. And we've gone beyond greed. This is a form of psychopathic narcissistic insanity.

Julian Kossof writes in the Telegraph: Bernard Madoff, enemy of the Jewish people:

Indeed, some in the Jewish community also fear the high-profile case will stoke a revival of centuries-old stereotypes of cunning, dishonest Jewish business people.

No wonder the packed courtroom applauded when Madoff was led of to jail for up to 150 years and at least one rabbi has called for him to be "excommunicated."

I've suggested here that Kossof may be right, that if a trend appears to emerge in ordinary people's minds, that won't (and can't) be good for the Jewish community. It's a statement based on ordinary reasoning. To be accused of 'racism' for making it, says something about the accuser. It smacks of a sense of self righteousness, rather than a sense of responsibility.

clipped from www.sowetan.co.za Hundreds of investors have been fleeced of up to 10 billion rand ($1,2 billion) in what could be South Africa’s biggest corporate fraud. Peter Winer, a lawyer representing several investors, said details were still unclear, but likened the fraud to the Ponzi scheme used by New York money manager Bernard Madoff to cheat thousands of investors of $65 billion over more than 20 years. “It could have started as a legitimate company, but by the end there was nothing there,” Winer, head of insolvency and corporate recovery at Werksmans Attorneys, told Reuters. “There are billions of rands involved and we don’t know for sure where the money is,” he said. A Ponzi scheme pays early investors returns from funds paid by later clients. Winer said it appeared as though Tannenbaum’s scheme collapsed when investors demanded to be repaid and new funds could not be found.