The Law is The Law: Not pretty….#Citigroup loses bid to recover $500m sent to #Revlon #Debt Holders by mistake

US judge rules recipients can keep the money in case involving loan made to Revlon.

Despite finding that the money Citi sent was “indisputably transferred by mistake”, Jesse Furman, a US district judge in Manhattan, wrote that he was bound by precedent to rule in favour of the funds.

“Were the court writing on a blank slate,” the judge wrote, he might have ruled in favour of Citi, given that the bank “realised its error and notified the lenders within one day”.

But New York law is explicit, he found: a recipient may keep funds transferred by mistake if they pay off a debt, the recipient did not know of the mistake and the recipient did not trick the sender into making the payment.

Judge Furman said the recipients had good reason to believe the payments were intentional. “To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1bn — would have been borderline irrational,” he wrote.

See the whole article on the FT here: Citigroup loses bid to recover $500m sent to funds by mistake

#Venezuela is so far behind sourcing #Covid19 #Vaccines that it could be 2023 or later before herd immunity could be achieved

Utter disaster, as to be expected...

More than any other nation in the Western Hemisphere, this broken socialist state might need a miracle to defeat the novel coronavirus

From the Washington Post:

Neutralize the coronavirus without a single side effect! No needle? No problem! Just a few drops of the magic liquid under the tongue every four hours and it’s goodbye lockdown, hello good health.

“From Venezuela to the world,” Nicolás Maduro declared in a national address, unveiling two shimmering vials of Carvativir.

Venezuelan medical professionals now say that Maduro’s “miracle drops” — which he pledged would rapidly go into mass production — are actually an extract of the herb thyme, used in homeopathic therapies and ordinary cooking.

Yet one aspect of the marketing blitz did ring true. More than any other nation in the Western Hemisphere, this broken socialist state might need a miracle to defeat the novel coronavirus.

Venezuela is so far behind in sourcing vaccines that analysts say it could be 2023 or later before it acquires enough to achieve herd immunity. That places it in the bottom rung of nations — alongside authoritarian peers North Korea, Syria and Myanmar — 

Maduro’s government missed a critical deadline last month to buy into a World Health Organization-linked vaccine program designed to help developing nations obtain supplies of coronavirus vaccine. Paolo Balladelli, the WHO’s Venezuela chief, tweeted Tuesday that the country still can get up to 2.4 million doses — a decent start for a country of 28.5 million — if it buys into the program by Tuesday.

See the whole story on the Washington Post here: 

Coronavirus Venezuela: Maduro touts supposed covid-19 cure Carvativir - The Washington Post

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Returning his investors’ money was the best bet #MichaelPlatt of #BlueCrest Capital has placed in the last couple of years...

Blue Crest's 95% Gain Swells Michael Platt's Wealth to $10 Billion 

Last year’s results represent BlueCrest’s biggest gain since Platt said he would return about $7 billion in clients’ money five years ago to focus on trading for himself and for his partners. Not much is known about the firm’s trading strategy since then, but it has given Platt, 52, the broad freedom to take riskier and highly leveraged bets to juice up returns

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-21/platt-s-bluecrest-gained-a-record-95-in-2020-amid-virus-chaos