Читать книгу The Most Dangerous Trade - Teitelbaum Richard - Страница 6

The meeting turned nasty even before it began. Manuel Asensio walked off the elevator wearing a gray-striped Norman Hilton suit into the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) offices at One Liberty Plaza – a hulking black steel skyscraper in lower Manhattan. He was an hour late and offered no apologies.

As the dapper Asensio entered the lobby, a NASD case manager walked up to greet him, extending his hand as he did so. Asensio ignored it, and turned to his lawyer.

“I can't believe that this guy thinks I'm going to shake his hand,” he told him. There were really no reasons for niceties from Asensio's perspective. The NASD had been routinely badgering him for thousands of pages of documents over the years, and he thought their goal was to drive him out of business.

The NASD had summoned Asensio in September 2004 to answer questions about his short-selling firm as well as six research reports published on the Asensio.com website. The research was part of a series describing alleged Medicare fraud at PolyMedica Corp, a NASDAQ-listed telemarketer of blood glucose test kits.

Then things got ugly. At the hearing, Asensio wouldn't respond when asked about ownership of his firm, Integral Securities. Because it wasn't an NASD member, he said he didn't have to answer. In his street-inflected Brooklyn accent, he called the proceedings “a fraudulent, corrupt, intentional attempt to discredit my firm, keep me from doing my work.” Asensio declared that the American Stock Exchange, NASD, and New York Stock Exchange were all guilty of harassment.

Asensio accused the NASD officers of staring, “making faces,” and “mocking” him. They were “hostile,” “crooks,” and “corrupt regulators.” After two hours of interrogation by NASD officers, Asensio announced that he had “provided more than enough time.” He got up and stalked out of the conference room.

The eruption cost him dearly. A NASD panel decided that Asensio had violated rule 8210, failing to respond in full to questions. Asensio says NASD officials offered him a deal: Pay $15,000 to settle and the matter would be effectively dropped. But that would not prevent the organization from coming after him in the future whenever he tried to uncover fraud. Asensio says he refused.

NASD's sentence: the organization's version of capital punishment – a lifetime bar from the securities industry.

“I call it ‘the evil decision,’” says Asensio. “It's corruption, and that's what it should be called.”