DealZone

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer at a September 2009 conference

Seems like old times. 

Eliot Spitzer, who rose to national prominence in 2002 when he forced a sleepy S.E.C. to crack down on conflicted analyst research,  is none too pleased to hear that his old rivals recently joined 12 Wall Street banks in seeking to knock big holes in that wall.

Asked for his thoughts on this Wall Street Journal article that broke the news, this is what he had to tell Reuters in an exclusive interview:

“For the S.E.C. to join with the banks to diminish consumer protections with respect to the quality of advice and research is absolutely and fundamentally violative of their duty to the public.  This one more example of the S.E.C. being in in the tank.”

It’s almost as if we turned the clocks back seven years. Spitzer gained his crusading “Elliot Ness” reputation in 2002 when he took the unprecedented step of probing banks and threatening to prosecute Wall Street executives, stepping around a passive S.E.C.

Yet even after Mary Schapiro replaced the ineffective Christopher Cox as the agency’s chairman, the Feds still appear reluctant to get tough, he said.    

After three days of hearings in a cramped courtroom at London’s Royal Courts of Justice, when the judge “blessed” lenders’ plan to take control of British car cleaning firm IMO Car Wash.

As I wrote earlier, this rare moment in the sunshine for Europe’s largest car-cleaning firm came as low-ranked junior lenders failed in their attempt to block senior creditors’ plans to take over the company as part of a debt restructuring.

On the first day of the hearings I counted no fewer than 72 people in the court as London’s distressed-debt and restructuring community queued to listen to the arguments in this landmark case. One day I ended up sitting on the floor of the courtroom next to one of London’s financial elite listening to lawyers putting forward complex legal arguments about valuation methodologies.

A month of overcast skies and frequent showers indicates it is business as usual for the British summer, and for one company each day of rain brings particular displeasure.

British car cleaning firm IMO Car Wash is struggling with more than 350 million pounds of debt, and some detractors say demand for its services drops each time it rains. As such, the value of the company is almost as changeable as a British summer.

This is a headache for both its private equity owner and lenders, who have been trying to settle a restructuring of IMO’s finances since the start of the year. Disputes over valuations have sparked a battle between different groups of lenders, with the result set to be decided in a London court on Monday.

The Chrysler bankruptcy hearing has swamped a Manhattan court with an unprecedented number of pleadings, according to docket tracking service NetDockets.com.

In the first 45 days of Chrysler’s bankruptcy, attorneys filed more than four times the number of pleadings than over the same period for collapsed corporate giants WorldCom or Enron.

More than 4,200 pleadings were filed in the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, said NetDockets. That’s more than the 967 pleadings related to Enron in the first six weeks, or even Lehman Brothers Holdings’ 1,362 pleadings.