Maybe Jon Corzine really didn’t have a clue about what was afoot at MF Global. According to a new piece in Vanity Fair (abstract online here), not too long ago, his wife was blithely discussing the couple’s impending purchase of a new French chateau:
[O]n October 15, two weeks before MF Global filed for bankruptcy, Corzine and his wife, Sharon Elghanayan, were at a birthday party in Paris talking about a château they were about to buy in the South of France. “It’s not in Cap Ferrat,” one person recalls Elghanayan saying, perhaps to mitigate the extravagance. “To buy any decent château is at least a couple of million euros,” explains another person who was at the party, “and that is before the renovation with the air-conditioning and the new kitchen. Sharon was very excited. She said she was flying down there on Monday morning.”
You heard the lady! It’s not even in Cap Ferrat. What could people possibly find extravagant about this? Unless there’s $1.2 billion in unmarked bills stuffed under the satin Louis XV couch cushions, nothing to see here. You know she said chateau, not chateaux, right? They sound very similar en français.
