At MF Global, Two Other Falling Stars
KEVIN ROOSE, On Monday October 31, 2011, 4:35 pm EDT
As MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Monday, much of the attention has focused on the Wall Street firm's chief executive, Jon S. Corzine, the former New Jersey governor and onetime head of Goldman Sachs.
But two of Mr. Corzine's lesser-known deputies - his chief financial office and chief risk officer - have also found themselves at the center of the maelstrom.
Henri Steenkamp, MF Global's chief financial officer, was a rising star at the firm. At 35, he was among the youngest C-level executives on Wall Street, and had recently been named the "40 Under 40" list at the trade publication, Treasury & Risk. In this role, he was responsible for overseeing "the company's financial operations, including treasury, accounting and all global financial control and reporting functions," according to his biography on the firm's Web site.
"Henri's achievements during his five years at MF Global - including his role in helping to build our global finance and reporting operations - make him exceptionally qualified to lead this function," Mr. Corzine said, in a press release earlier this year announcing Mr. Steenkamp's appointment to chief financial officer. "I am confident that all of our stakeholders will benefit from his financial acumen and sound understanding of MF Global."
Before coming to MF Global in 2006 as vice president of external reporting, Mr. Steenkamp spent 8 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting firm, both in South Africa and in New York, where he "assisted South African companies as they went public in the U.S," according to the biography.
During an October conference call announcing the firm's most recently quarterly earnings, less than two weeks before the firm filed for bankruptcy, Mr. Steenkamp reassured analysts that MF Global was on stable ground.
"Despite these uncertain and volatile times, we feel good about our capital structure and liquidity position," he said.
Michael G. Stockman, MF Global's chief risk officer who joined the firm in January, comes from a long background of risk management. According to his firm biography, he is a former chief risk officer for the American branch of UBS, leaving in 2008.
In addition to his duties at MF Global, Mr. Stockman also has a foot in academia. He is a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, and has made a bit of an academic specialty of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007. In 2008, he told Tuck Today, the school's alumni magazine, that he thought the crisis was the fault of no single person or entity, but rather the combined effects of mortgage originators, borrowers, rating agencies and other intermediaries all missing vital warning signs that the sector was collapsing.
"Small mistakes can end up compounding and causing catastrophic damage," Mr. Stockman said of that disaster, three years before his firm's own.
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