MF Global Money Found in Britain?

About $200 million in customer money that vanished from MF Global is believed to have surfaced at JPMorgan Chase in Britain, according to people briefed on the matter. The discovery could be the most significant breakthrough in a monthlong hunt for the missing funds.

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During MF Global's

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[MFGLQ  Loading...      ()   ] last chaotic days, the brokerage firm overdrew an account at JPMorgan

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[JPM  Loading...      ()   ], according to another person who is close to the matter. Some investigators now believe the firm used customer funds to patch at least some of the hole, which would have been a significant breach of federal law.

MF Global transferred the roughly $200 million in the days before the firm filed for bankruptcy, said the people, who requested anonymity because the investigation was incomplete.

Some investigators suspect that the transfer to JPMorgan was the first major misuse of customer money at MF Global, the commodity brokerage powerhouse once run by Jon S. Corzine, the former Democratic governor of New Jersey. Authorities are also looking into whether JPMorgan initially questioned the source of the cash and sought proof from MF Global that it was complying with regulations, one of the people said.

The authorities believe MF Global failed to give JPMorgan full documentation for the cash, the people briefed on the matter said. But the bank’s concerns hardly mattered because the money had already been transferred to the account in Britain. It is unclear whether investigators can recover the $200 million.

Representatives for both MF Global and JPMorgan declined to comment. A spokesman for the MF Global trustee, James W. Giddens, declined to comment.

JPMorgan has long been thought to hold some of the money that disappeared from MF Global. As one of MF Global’s primary banks, JPMorgan has been a persistent presence in the firm’s demise and the messy aftermath. The bank loaned to MF Global until its waning days and has been a vocal and tenacious presence as a creditor during the firm’s bankruptcy hearings.

Rumors circulated briefly this month that the missing money had turned up at the bank. The reports were dispelled later in the same day, however, when investigators disclosed those funds had already been accounted for.

Some of the funds MF Global used to shore up its account with JPMorgan may have been legitimately transferred. Firms often keep a cushion of cash to protect customer accounts, which they are allowed to tap with certain restrictions. While the firm ultimately blew through that buffer, it is unclear when that happened and if MF Global intentionally used customer money.

Some industry lawyers liken JPMorgan’s role in the MF Global bankruptcy to the bank’s position in the messy collapse of Lehman Brothers, albeit on a smaller scale. As the nation’s largest bank, JPMorgan is intimately involved in many large bankruptcies. In 2008, as Lehman Brothers was struggling to survive, JPMorgan officials demanded several billion dollars in collateral to meet margin calls. Lehman acquiesced, severely draining its liquidity.