I didn't need to look for impropriety at American Home Mortgage to guess that it should be considered if you were to make an investment in their defaulted paper. They appointed Stephen Cooper CEO. Stephen Cooper is who you appoint when you do not want the bankruptcy management looking at your past. See my last post. The Wall Street Journal has however beaten me to the story. In an article about two Bear Stearns executives that face indictment is this little throw-away: Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn are investigating whether the Swiss bank UBS AG improperly valued its holdings and whether the collapsed mortgage lender American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. of Melville, N.Y., engaged in accounting fraud, people familiar with the matters have said. Prosecutors in Manhattan and Los Angeles are respectively probing whether mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Corp. engaged in securities fraud or loan fraud. None ...

Stephen Cooper runs companies in bankruptcy or financial distress. Past clients include Enron, Krispy Creme, and Collins and Aikman. Current clients include American Home Mortgage as this press article indicates. So how does Stephen Cooper get all the best clients? Well he is competent in business administration even if he thought he could make a viable business of Enron. But there are plenty of people competent in business administration and they didn't think that they could recover anything viable from Enron. Krispy Kreme (another Cooper business) has not turned around even though Stephen Cooper collected his "success fee". In that case - and I am not kidding - Stephen Cooper's definition of success was the elapsing of sufficient time. There is however a simple way that Stephen Cooper gets his business. He never sues past management. When he was appointed to the Enron position he simply disavowed any ...