Loan, what loan?

Corporate financiers should be hanging their heads in shame. Less than eight weeks after a group of leading investment banks took Refco public, the company announced that a $430m loan to an outside company was in fact a loan to an entity owned by its CEO, Phillip Bennett. The loan, which dates back several years, to before Sarbanes-Oxley banned companies from making direct personal loans to CEOs, is not by itself illegal. But the link between the outside company and the CEO should have been dis...