Former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine channeled his inner farm boy on the stand in Manhattan federal court on Thursday as he tried to place some of the blame for the stunning collapse of his former commodity brokerage firm on the company’s accountant.
Corzine, who was head of MF Global when it suddenly declared bankruptcy in 2011, animatedly explained financial topics using hayseed examples, recalling his childhood on an “Illinois family farm.”
“My father would plant corn in the spring and harvest in the fall,’’ the 70-year-old said at one point when talking about futures trading.
As for his role in the 2011 implosion of MF Global, Corzine said the bankruptcy had nothing to do with his $6.3 billion investment in risky European bonds.
“I thought they were relatively low risk,” the former Goldman Sachs chief insisted.
Instead, it was PricewaterhouseCoopers’ accounting of those bonds, which were kept off the $2 billion company’s balance sheet, that led to a “loss of confidence” from investors in the company, Corzine said.
The court-appointed administrator of the long-shuttered MF Global has sued PwC in Manhattan federal court for $3 billion in damages, claiming its action helped bring about the brokerage’s demise.
Corzine was called as witness in the administrator’s case.
MF Global’s lawyer, Stephen Sorensen, pressed the administrator’s case in court on Thursday.
“Did MF Global rely on PwC to relay to the market that its financial statements were fairly stated?” Sorensen asked Corzine.
“Yes,” Corzine replied.
Sorensen then asked whether PwC ever told the former governor that the accounting method used to keep the billions of dollars in dubious bond bets off the books was “risky accounting.”
“Not to my recollection,” Corzine said.
The former Goldman Sachs co-chairman added that his bond bets did ultimately make money.
But that was only after full details of the investment emerged, causing the firm’s credit rating to be downgraded and spooking investors to pull out.
“I believe that if the marketplace had understood that we did not lose this money, we would have been in a much more secured position,” Corzine said on the stand.
The company’s collapse — and revelations that more than $1.6 billion in customers’ funds had gone missing in the process — has sullied Corzine’s illustrious four-decade career.
PwC has alleged in court that efforts to keep the bonds off the books were all MF Global’s idea — and that Corzine, as the firm’s CEO, was the “mastermind and the driver” of the investment strategy.
The missing customer funds were repaid in full in 2014, and Corzine agreed earlier this year to pay a $5 million penalty for improperly using them as MF Global struggled to stay afloat.
He also agreed to a lifetime ban from leading another futures brokerage or registering with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
“As the CEO of MF Global in 2011, I have accepted responsibility for its failure, and I deeply regret the impact it had on customers, employees, shareholders and others,” he said in January.
Corzine told the jury that he now teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University and manages money for his family and charity.
He’s expected to be cross-examined on Friday morning.
“As he has done each of the several times he had been questioned under oath about what happened at MF Global, including his Congressional testimony, he testified truthfully,” a spokesman for the disgraced Wall Street executive said in a statement.