Dear Brother Corzine:

Here's an early Christmas present even though I find that holiday so loathsome, as you know.  It's a federal court of appeals decision that came out last week.

I trust you'll find it as comforting as I do.

"Instead of maintaining customer assets in segregated accounts as required by law, Sentinel had pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in customer assets to secure an overnight loan at the Bank of New York, now Bank of New York Mellon. This left the bank in a secured position on Sentinel's $312 million loan but its customers out millions. After filing for bankruptcy, Sentinel's liquidation trustee brought a variety of claims against the bank to dislodge its secured position. After extensive proceedings, including more than two weeks of trial over the course of more than a month, the district court rejected the claims. This appeal raises concerns about Sentinel's business practices and the degree to which the bank knew about them, but based on the district court's factual findings, we affirm."

Yours in Untrammeled Malevolence,

Satan

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UPDATE - Satan Clarifies His Letter

To be clear about my minions' fine work in punishing innocent account holders by rewarding evildoers with the contents of those accounts: the court freely acknowledges, in the 1st sentence of the opinion, that Sentinel's transfer of those accounts--to the Honorable Jon Corzine's colleagues at Bank of New York Mellon ("Bank")--was illegal.

Clinging to the notion that the rule of law has any place in my Kingdom of Evil, the account holders tried to prove they were entitled to their own money, even after it was stolen, under a theory of "equitable subordination," under which Bank's claim to the purloined funds would have been subordinated to those naive account holders. Too succeed under the dead letter of law, the account holders had to prove that the Bank acted inequitably, that is, with conduct that was egregious.

As a humorous demonstration of my raw dark power, I dispatched to court several officials of the Bank--all pathological liars--whose own email correspondence demonstrates to a certainty that they knew that the $300 million transferred could not possibly have belonged to Sentinel, but must instead have belonged to the fools banking there.

Predictably, the Bank officials perjured themselves repeatedly at trial.

It is on the following basis that I will appoint all three appellate court panel members to an Executive Suite in Hell.  What follows is a perversion of justice so remarkably devious that I'm inclined to strike the judicial triumvirate dead this instant so that we may enjoy cocktails together before dining on slaughtered puppies this evening:

"Instead of finding that their testimony justified a finding of egregious bank behavior, the district court essentially found that the bank officials were such artless liars that they couldn't have been concealing deliberate wrongdoing.  Instead, the bank officials were simply trying to cover up their own incompetence."

Keep on Rocking in the Free World,

The Devil Himself