U.S. criminal investigators will step up probes into possible fraud involving collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, a top federal prosecutor in New York said.
Christopher Garcia, chief of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan, told white-collar criminal-defense lawyers at a conference today that his office will spend this year investigating possible fraud involving CDOs and CDSs.
“If there’s crime there, we’re going to find it and we’re going to pursue it,” Garcia said at an American Bar Association meeting in San Diego. Investigators won’t be deterred by the complexity of the financial instruments, he said.
CDOs are pools of assets such as mortgage bonds packaged into new securities. Interest payments on the underlying bonds or loans are used to pay investors.