Thursday, January 5, 2012

Democrats so love the 99 percenters

Jon craved French chateau



Jon Corzine
and his wealthy wife,Sharon Elghanayan, planned to buy a lavish chateau in the South of France just two weeks before the scandal-hit former New Jersey governor’s firm MF Global went down in flames.

According to a Vanity Fair report, the couple attended a 60th birthday party — for New York real estate developerDaniel Brodsky’s wife — in Paris, where Corzine and Elghanayan boasted to fellow guests about their plans to snap up a sprawling Riviera residence.

“Two weeks before MF Global filed for bankruptcy, [Corzine and Elghanayan] were at a birthday party in Paris talking about a chateau they were about to buy in the South of France,” VF claims, adding that Elghanayan told a fellow guest, “ ‘It’s not in Cap Ferrat’ . . . perhaps to mitigate the extravagance.”

Soon after, MF Global filed the eighth-largest bankruptcy in corporate history, and accountants discovered up to $1.2 billion in missing client money they’re still scrambling to find.

“To buy any decent chateau is at least a couple of million euros,” another person at the Oct. 15 party told Vanity Fair, adding, “And that is before the renovation with the air-conditioning and the new kitchen. Sharon was very excited. She said she was flying down there on Monday morning.”

The article describes another piece of prized real estate that Corzine desired — his Sagaponack home, which his first wife,Joanne, sold to rival hedge-funderDavid Tepper, a Corzine nemesis from their time at Goldman.

When they divorced in 2003, Joanne insisted on keeping the house, then valued at $9 million. But in 2010, after renting the house for $900,000 for one summer, she sold it for $44 million. “The buyer was none other than [Tepper],” VF reports. Friends said Corzine was “apoplectic . . . [and] grew even angrier when Tepper tore down the house to build one of his own. ‘That was just a massive [bleep]-you to Jon,’ recalls a friend.”

A rep for Corzine had no comment.




No comments: