MF Global trustee may sue Corzine

Former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine could face a lawsuit from the trustee trying to recover $1.6 billion in customer money from the collapse of the brokerage MF Global.

James Giddens, the trustee overseeing the liquidation of the company, said in a bankruptcy court filing in Manhattan Monday he may sue Corzine for breach of fiduciary duty and negligence. He said his investigation found that after Corzine took over as chief executive in March 2010, MF Global changed "dramatically" and that he led the company to trade in unsafe securities and take on far greater risk than comparable companies did.

Corzine declined to comment through a spokesman.

Corzine, a former U.S. senator and CEO of the investment bank Goldman Sachs, took the top job at MF Global aiming to make the modest brokerage into a Wall Street powerhouse. But it filed for bankruptcy protection, crippled by bad bets on European debt, less than two years later. The bankruptcy was the largest on Wall Street since Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008.

Corzine has told Congress he did not know customer money was missing until the day before MF Global collapsed. But Giddens said top management was partly responsible for the disappearance of customer money.