WASHINGTON - A bankruptcy trustee's proposal to give bonuses to MF Global executives to find money it owes farmers around the country is "unethical" and "sick," victims said Monday.
Executives who told congressional committees that they didn't know what happened to $1.6 billion in missing funds are "now basically being paid to cover their own tracks," said Minnesota farmer Dean Tofteland.
Tofteland, who grows wheat and corn and raises cattle in Luverne, said he is still out $70,000 from funds that MF Global wasn't supposed to touch. Nationally, most farmers have collected 72 cents of every missing dollar. But they want to be made whole.
That's why Tofteland hopes the judge in the eighth-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history rejects trustee Louis Freeh's plan to give bonuses to Chief Operating Officer Bradley Abelow, General Counsel Laurie Ferber and Chief Financial Officer Henri Steenkamp if they can unravel the secret of the missing funds.
Freeh's plan envisions no such payments to Jon Corzine, the former Democratic U.S. senator and New Jersey governor who ran MF Global at the time it went under.
"When I read about the plan, I couldn't believe it," said Tofteland, who testified in December to the Senate Agriculture Committee about hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money that MF Global may have transferred illegally as the company collapsed. "We've got a mess here. It's not about money; it's about a system of justice and rules. Until all the customers are made whole, there should be no bonuses.
"It's unethical."
Keith Sorenson of Sorensen Yaggie Commodity Consultants in Nisswa said dozens of Minnesota farmers he advises still have not gotten all of their money back. Those customers now face issues with how to report those losses on their taxes. As the bankruptcy bureaucracy keeps farmers in limbo, Sorensen called the bonus proposal "sick."
