Readers’ Views
People were hurt, Blank, by the crimes you committed
WHEN I saw the article about Greg Blank, “Greg draws a blank in Belfort parallel” (February 2), I felt initial sympathy with him that his crimes of more than 20 years ago were hauled out again. After all, he had received his punishment.
However, on reading the article, my sympathy quickly evaporated.
I want to address two of Blank’s propositions that cannot go unchallenged: that his misdeeds were harmless, because “at the end of the day no one was losing”; and that he was entitled to think that he was not doing anything wrong because “everyone else [was] doing it”.
The report quotes Blank as saying: “People never lost their money with me. There was no public involved, it was only institutions.” The institutions that Blank and his co-conspirators targeted to make substantial profits for themselves were pension fund organisations. Their illegal profits were made at the expense of the members of those funds and their widows, orphans and other dependants.
If the conspiracy was not uncovered and investigated so that illegal profits could be recovered, the pension fund benefits of ordinary members of the public would have been negatively affected. The pension fund would have had less money than what it should have had if Blank and his co-conspirators did not create fraudulent share prices so that they could make a profit for themselves.
In addition, by buying and selling small parcels of the same shares to drive up the price, Blank fraudulently manipulated the market in those shares to the detriment of all market participants.
The second proposition, that he did not think he had done anything wrong because everybody else was doing it, must be the oldest excuse in the book.
People who steal from others, whether directly or indirectly, through fraud are convicted and sentenced every day.
There is no reason stockbrokers and asset managers should be treated any differently. If anything, they are more blameworthy because they occupy a position of trust and have a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of their clients.
In any event, Blank did not merely do what other stockbrokers in the exchange were doing. He took the fraudulent ramping and manipulation of share prices to a whole new level. The conspiracy in which he was involved grew exponentially over a few months, both in the number of shares traded and the illegal profits made. It was breaching the million-rands-per-deal mark when it was busted, and there is no telling where it might have gone if it was not stopped.
It would be a sad day if a new generation of stockbrokers and others who are entrusted with the public’s money were seduced by Blank’s selfserving justifications to convince themselves that there is nothing inherently wrong in what he did.
He reckons nobody got hurt. One of his co-conspirators committed suicide and another fled the country and lost a very senior position. Thanks to the vigilance of the JSE under Tony Norton at the time and Old Mutual, he was brought to book. —