MF Global Fired 15 Japan Workers Before Bankruptcy, Union Secretary Says

MF Global Holdings Ltd. (MF) fired 15 employees from its Japan unit before filing for bankruptcy yesterday, said Kazuyuki Sugimoto, secretary general at the Federation of Foreign Bank Employees Union.

The analysts, traders and sales staff had their employment contracts terminated, Sugimoto said in a telephone interview in Tokyo today. Workers from the New York-based securities firm’s Japan unit joined the federation in September, he said.

“We are not able to comment on this,” Clara Goh, MF Global’s Singapore-based spokeswoman for Asia Pacific, wrote in an e-mailed reply to inquiries about the dismissals from Bloomberg News.

The Japanese unit, MF Global FXA Securities Ltd., has 53 employees, according to the Financial Services Agency. The FSA issued an order protecting the assets of the unit and instructed the firm to improve its business, it said in a statement today.

MF Global, the holding company for the broker-dealer run by former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) co-chairman Jon Corzine, listed debt of $39.7 billion and assets of $41 billion in Chapter 11 papers filed yesterday to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The impact of the company’s collapse on Japan’s financial system will be negligible, Financial Services Minister Shozaburo Jimi told reporters in Tokyo. MF Global FXA Securities has capital of 935 million yen ($12 million), the FSA statement said.

Of the 15 dismissed workers, 14 were based in Tokyo and one worked in Singapore, Sugimoto said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Takahiko Hyuga in Tokyo at thyuga@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chitra Somayaji at csomayaji@bloomberg.net

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Oct. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Neil Barofsky, former special inspector general for the U.S. Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor, Sean Egan, president of Egan-Jones Ratings Co., and Richard Bove, an analyst at Rochdale Securities LLC, offer their views on today's filing for bankruptcy protection by MF Global Holdings Ltd. This report also contains comments from Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Capital; Matthew McCormick, vice president and portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Inc.; Alexander Diaz-Matos, an analyst at Covenant Review LLC; David Kotok, chief investment officer at Cumberland Advisors Inc., and William Cohan, author of "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World" and a Bloomberg View Columnist. (Source: Bloomberg)