Italy has a new president, Segio Mattarella, a 73-year-old constitutional judge from Sicily.

The president of Italy has limited powers: he or she guarantees that politics complies with the Italian constitution, but real political responsibility remains with the government. However, the election of Mattarella is important for both the centre-left prime minister Matteo Renzi and his Democratic Party. Mattarella represents integrity, and has made no secret of his contempt for the kind of politics that has bolstered the interests of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi over the years..

Italians were expecting Renzi to agree with Berlusconi on the nomination of a candidate who had the blessing of both leaders. However, Renzi opted for a candidate who would be viewed positively by all the members of his own Democratic Party, including those who disagreed with the Berlusconi pact.

Renzi has succeeded in severely weakening Berlusconi’s Forza Italia. In early January 2015, opinion polls put national support for the party at just 13%, and now around 40 out of 142 Forza Italia members of parliament voted for Mattarella as president, despite Berlusconi. Forza Italia members are clearly starting to realise that Berlusconi no longer has a future in Italian politics.

Sergio Mattarella is an incredibly bold choice for Italy. He is most commonly associated with his firm stance against organised crime and corruption. He fought the mafia and even resigned from his post as an education minister in the Democratic Christian government of Giulio Andreotti in 1990 when a law that would enable Berlusconi to further expand his media empire was passed.

Mattarella’s father Bernardo, an anti-fascist who opposed Benito Mussolini, was one of the founders of the Christian Democratic party. But Sergio only entered politics after the murder of his brother Piersanti Mattarella at the hands of the mafia in 1980, when he was president of the regional government of Sicily.

He went on to promote the “Palermo Spring”, which encouraged citizens to promote a culture of legality and rebellion against the mafia.

For these reasons and more, Mattarella represents the fight against corruption in Italy. His election follows that of Pietro Grasso, head of the National Anti-mafia Directorate, as president of the Senate in 2013.

According to the Corruption Perception Index of 2014 which measures the perceived levels of public sector corruption worldwide, Italy was the most corrupt state in the European Union – and it was ranked 69th worldwide. And in 2014, a corruption ring was exposed in Rome, involving dozens of administrators and civil servants who now stand accused of criminal activities such as vote rigging, usury, extortion and embezzlement.

On his first day in the Italian parliament, Mattarella received a standing ovation. He said: “In the fight against mafia, we have had many heros. I would like us to remember Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino”, both anti-mafia Sicilian magistrates killed by the mafia in 1992.

What one hand takes away, the other hand gives.  The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has voted to give Oppenheimer Holdings Inc. (NYSE:OPY) & Company a break from further enforcement action after a “bad actor” ban was triggered and then subsequently waived by an SEC commissioner’s vote.

Two of five SEC commissioners, however, are speaking out against the waiver for what they see as repeated offenses, placing law and order credentials of SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White, a Democrat and former prosecutor, into question.   White cast the deciding vote with two Republican commissioners in favor of Oppenheimer.

Here’s the problem:  We have rules and when they are ignored, we wink and let the offending party continue doing buisness as was and is.  We are following the US Department of Labor’s decision on whether or not to waive the criminal charges levied against Credit Suisse so they can continue with their 2 billion dollar pension business in the US, despite admitting to aiding and abetting US tax evaders.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Oppenheimer & Co. with violating federal securities laws while improperly selling penny stocks in unregistered offerings on behalf of customers.  Oppenheimer agreed to admit wrongdoing and pay $10 million to settle the SEC’s charges. Oppenheimer will pay an additional $10 million to settle a parallel action by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

According to the SEC’s order instituting a settled administrative proceeding, Oppenheimer engaged in two courses of misconduct. The first involved aiding and abetting illegal activity by a customer and ignoring red flags that business was being conducted without an applicable exemption from the broker-dealer registration requirements of the federal securities laws. The customer was Gibraltar Global Securities, a brokerage firm in the Bahamas that is not registered to do business in the U.S. Oppenheimer executed sales of billions of shares of penny stocks for a supposed proprietary account in Gibraltar’s name while knowing or being reckless in not knowing that Gibraltar was actually executing transactions and providing brokerage services for its underlying customers, including many in the U.S. The SEC separately charged Gibraltar in 2013 for its alleged misconduct.

The SEC’s order finds that Oppenheimer failed to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) as required under the Bank Secrecy Act to report potential misconduct by Gibraltar and its customers, and the firm failed to properly report, withhold, and remit more than $3 million in backup withholding taxes from sales proceeds in Gibraltar’s account. Oppenheimer also failed to recognize the resulting liabilities and expenses in violation of the books-and-records requirements, and improperly recorded transactions for Gibraltar’s customers in Oppenheimer’s books and records.

SEC Press Release:  According to the SEC’s order, the second course of misconduct involved Oppenheimer again engaging on behalf of another customer in unregistered sales of billions of shares of penny stocks. The SEC’s investigation, which is continuing, found that the sales generated approximately $12 million in profits of which Oppenheimer was paid $588,400 in commissions. The firm’s liability stems from its failure to respond to red flags and conduct a searching inquiry into whether the sales were exempt from registration requirements of the federal securities laws, and its failure reasonably to supervise with a view toward detecting and preventing violations of the registration provisions.

The SEC’s order requires Oppenheimer to cease and desist from committing or causing any violations and any future violations of Section 15(a) and 17(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rules 17a-3 and 17a-8, and of Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933. In addition to the monetary remedies, Oppenheimer agreed to be censured and undertake such remedial measures as retaining an independent consultant to review its policies and procedures over a five-year period.  Oppenheimer Case

Design Rachel Gold

Banyan writes:  In October Joko Widodo was inaugurated as Indonesia’s president, with parliament controlled by an opposition of bad losers threatening to thwart all his plans. Yet by this week, when Jokowi, as he is known, marked 100 days in office, his biggest headaches were caused by his own party, the PDI-P. It has stoked a confrontation between the notoriously corrupt police force and a popular anti-corruption body. The row risks blunting the great political weapon Jokowi has so far wielded to cow friend and foe alike: his personal popularity.

At the centre of it is Budi Gunawan. The policeman had been under a cloud since 2010 because his bank balance bulged suspiciously for a humble cop’s.  On January 23rd, the police arrested a KPK commissioner, Bambang Widjojanto, on flimsy-looking charges of encouraging perjury in 2010, when he was a campaigning private lawyer. He has resigned. To many, the arrest seemed like retaliation by the police. The three other KPK commissioners are also under investigation. The KPK needs a quorum of three to function, so it risks paralysis.

The affair undermines faith in his commitment to wiping out corruption. Like his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, in other ways his polar opposite, Jokowi is respected as honest and a doughty fighter against graft. Many Indonesians know from personal experience that the police cannot be trusted.

Mr Budi’s appointment also mocked hopes that Jokowi would make promotions on merit. A businessman from a humble background, Jokowi worked his way to power through winning direct elections, first as mayor of his Javanese hometown, Solo, then as governor of the capital, Jakarta.

Perhaps Jokowi is not his own boss, and Ms Megawati still calls the important shots.

At home, these hardline policies are popular. Mr Jokowi appealed to voters not as a soft-centred liberal but as a no-nonsense small-town mayor who gets things done. And that is another reason why his deliberate, letter-of-the-law handling of the crisis over the KPK is so damaging.

It is also distracting attention from his rapid achievement of some economic-policy goals: starting the distribution of smartcards to poor Indonesians, entitling them to free health care and education, and removing fuel subsidies. Greatly helped by the plunge in the oil price, this last measure has freed billions of dollars for investment in infrastructure and social welfare. Environmentalists also give the president grudging credit for making a start on another crying need: affording better protection to Indonesia’s forests.