I had expected to spend this weekend digesting the latest report on the demise of MF Global, a 174-page post-mortem published last week by the trustee in charge of investigating how MF Global managed to lose $1.2 billion of customer money before it went bankrupt in October 2011. For better or worse, however, compliance and risk professionals can read all they need to know about MF Global’s collapse in three deplorable sentences on Page 74:
“Before [MF Global] went public, it acquired several disparate companies it never properly integrated. As one subordinate wrote in April 2010, ‘There is little business or dispositional integration between the many offices and branches. There is, in short, no house culture.’ The unwieldy corporate structure lacked cohesion both in its culture and in its operating structure.”
