Structured Financial Products and Financial Engineering A Tax Avoidance Investigation

For the last decade, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has presented case histories showing how financial institutions, law firms, accountants, and others have designed and implemented complex financial structures to take advantage of and, at times, abuse or violate U.S. tax statutes, securities regulations, and accounting rules. This book offers yet another detailed case study of how two financial institutions -- Deutsche Bank AG and Barclays Bank PLC -- developed structured financial products called MAPS and COLT, two types of basket options, and sold them to one or more hedge funds, including Renaissance Technologies LLC and George Weiss Associates, that used them to avoid federal taxes and leverage limits on buying securities with borrowed funds.