Customer Relations 101, By MF Global's Kevin Davis

It’s always an honor to meet the chief executive officer of a major financial services company. But for him (or her, if any), it's probably not so pleasurable dealing with the out-of-town riff-raff a-hob-nobbing. Especially if the 'him' in question is Kevin Davis, chief executive of MF Global Ltd (formerly Man Financial).

As this vignette, hiding in plain sight among the hundreds of square miles of innocent forest destroyed in the fallout from the collapse of Paul Eustace’s Philadelphia Alternative Asset Management Co, aptly demonstrates:

During his May 10 [2005] visit, [Philadelphia Stock Exchange vice-chairman and PAAM director John] Wallace drank cappuccino and chatted with Davis.

While Wallace remembers Davis speaking well of the Offshore Fund and its performance, Davis denies discussing anything other than the Philadelphia Stock Exchange with Wallace. Indeed, Davis testified that he did not even know with which customer Wallace was associated, nor did he care, because “part of my role as CEO is to meet and greet various of my colleagues’ customers as they come in through the day.

I don’t know who they are. I just do
a good job of pretending that I
am interested in what they have to say.

(Davis Dep. at 116:19 – Apr. 24 2007, Ex. 30.)

Of course, the whole PAAM thing, and its $170 million of investor losses, is “just a brokerage issue.”

Davis’s next public appearance is on Tuesday, Oct. 30, at a 10:00 am conference call to discuss MF’s fiscal second quarter results. It’ll be interesting to see if any of Wall Street’s Finest (© Jeff Matthews) get to questions about that RICO pigeon fluttering around the federal court in Philadelphia.

Or whether MF’s LTCM-level leverage at its minority-owned subsidiary, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is enough to keep that “may seek to cite and fine us” investigation, already more than two years old, in a bag until it’s too late to be of any use to the PAAM plaintiffs.

Receiver ad litem v. Man Financial Inc et al
Memorandum of law in opposition to motion for summary judgment
Page 65; Page 84 (pdf numbering).