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Former Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick stood before a federal judge yesterday and apologized for putting the people of his city through a corruption scandal so vast that prosecutors say it helped accelerate Detroit’s march toward bankruptcy, the New York Times reported yesterday. “They’re hurting,” Kilpatrick said. “A great deal of that hurt I accept full responsibility for.” They were solemn words from the formerly boisterous figure, who many believed would lead Detroit out of its long economic downturn. Then, declaring an end to the bribery and thieving that marked the Kilpatrick administration, U.S. District Court Judge Nancy G. Edmunds imposed the sentence prosecutors had sought: 28 years in prison. Kilpatrick was convicted in March of two dozen counts that included charges of racketeering and extortion, adding his name to a list of at least 18 city officials who have been convicted of corruption during his tenure. For Detroiters, Kilpatrick’s meteoric fall — from potential savior of a struggling city to prison-bound symbol of financial mismanagement — may be the closest they will get to holding past leaders accountable for decades of disappointment and poor fiscal decisions. “He’s become the poster child of what went wrong with the city and why it went bankrupt,” said Adolph Mongo, a political consultant who worked for Mr. Kilpatrick’s re-election campaign. But it was unfair to pin the city’s problems on any single elected leader, he said. “It was a house of cards,” added Mongo about Detroit’s fiscal health. “Kilpatrick was the last card. He fell, and it knocked everything down.”

A California federal judge has delayed the sentencing of Philip Horn, a Wells Fargo broker who pleaded guilty to defrauding more than a dozen clients, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. Judge Gary A. Fees on Monday postponed Horn's sentencing to March 4 to give the various parties more time to determine how much money was pilfered from customer accounts, according to lawyers representing the broker's clients. Horn was a broker for Wells Fargo in Los Angeles. For more than two years, he executed and canceled trades in clients' portfolios, pocketing the profits. Wells Fargo said that it uncovered the fraud in the fall of 2011. Horn, who last year pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud, was supposed to be sentenced on January 7.

The younger brother of Bernard Madoff will serve 10 years in prison for his role in his brother's Ponzi scheme that stole billions of dollars from investors, Reuters reported yesterday. Peter Madoff pleaded guilty in June to criminal charges including conspiracy to commit securities fraud for falsifying the books and records of the investment advisory company founded by his brother. U.S. District Court Judge Laura Taylor Swain adopted prosecutors' recommendations and sentenced Madoff to 10 years in prison. She also ordered him to forfeit what she called a "draconian" $143.1 billion, which she said would seal his "financial ruination."

Bankruptcy court trustee Ronald Durkin filed a motion in federal court yesterday to compel beleaguered movie financier David Bergstein and one of his lawyers, Victor Sahn, to sign statements evidencing the finances of five companies now in involuntary bankruptcy, according to The Hollywood Reporter today. The motion by Durkin, a former FBI agent and forensic accountant, threatens financial sanctions against Bergstein and Sahn for filing earlier financial schedules in "bad faith." Bergstein was identified by the bankruptcy court as the official representative of the five bankrupt companies, which include Capitol Films, ThinkFilm and R2D2, which was a holding company for Bergstein and his business partner Ronald Tutor. The motion asks bankruptcy court Judge Barry Russell to impose financial sanctions on Bergstein and Sahn for filing past statements in bad faith and to sanction their "bad faith litigation tactics." The trustee's motion comes two days after a U.K. company controlled by Bergstein filed a lawsuit against the trustee and a movie distributor for interfering with Bergstein's attempts to collect money owed from movies that he licensed in the past.

U.S. prosecutors told a Houston jury that two former accounting executives at Stanford Financial Group Co. should be convicted of helping Texas financier R. Allen Stanford conceal the theft of billions of dollars from investors at his offshore bank, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The government asked jurors to reject claims by ex-Chief Accounting Officer Gilbert Lopez and former Global Controller Mark Kuhrt that they were duped by Stanford and his finance chief into creating false financial statements, which investors relied on to buy $7 billion of fraudulent certificates of deposit from Antigua-based Stanford International Bank Ltd. Lopez and Kuhrt, who went on trial on Oct. 17, are the last two Stanford executives to be criminally tried for their roles in a Ponzi scheme built on bogus CDs.

U.S. regulators said on Friday that they were postponing a significant part of the financial regulatory overhaul after banks said they would not be ready for the new rules, the New York Times DealBook blog reported. The regulators proposed the rules in June as part of an international effort to harmonize the global financial system. Smaller banks immediately objected to the proposals, saying that they would be too costly and might deter them from making loans. Some of the rules were supposed to take effect at the beginning of next year, but regulators have decided a delay makes sense. "In light of the volume of comments received and the wide range of views expressed during the comment period, the agencies do not expect that any of the proposed rules would become effective on January 1, 2013," according to a statement from the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

MoneyGram International Inc., a provider of cash transfers worldwide, agreed to forfeit $100 million to resolve U.S. charges that some of its agents defrauded customers, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. The forfeiture is part of a deferred-prosecution agreement between the Dallas-based company and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Harrisburg, Pa. Prosecutors will withdraw criminal charges if MoneyGram complies with the agreement for five years, according to papers filed in federal court. The settlement stems from an investigation from 2003 to 2009 into transactions involving MoneyGram’s U.S. and Canadian agents, as well as its fraud-complaint data and consumer anti- fraud program.

Societe Generale SA, Royal Bank of Canada, and Bank of America Corp. are among nine additional banks that were subpoenaed in New York and Connecticut’s probe of alleged manipulation of the London interbank offered rate (Libor), Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The subpoenas, issued by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman starting in August, bring to 16 the total number of banks that have been subpoenaed in the states’ investigation. Schneiderman and Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen are jointly investigating claims that banks rigged the Libor, a worldwide benchmark for borrowing. Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has also issued subpoenas to more than a dozen financial institutions, including UBS AG, Deutsche Bank AG and HSBC Holdings Plc.

CME Group Inc. plans next month to begin paying $2 million to former clients of Peregrine Financial Group, the failed futures brokerage looted for years by its now-jailed founder, Reuters reported yesterday. The payments will go to nearly 200 farmers, ranchers and cooperatives who traded on CME's exchanges. The payouts are CME's first from a fund it established in response to the collapse of MF Global last October, which left a $1.6 billion shortfall in customer funds and shook confidence in an industry where the safety of customer money had long been an article of faith.

Solyndra LLC has accused Suntech Power Holdings Co. (STP) and other Chinese companies of destroying it by running an illegal cartel, Bloomberg reported today. Solyndra, which sought bankruptcy protection in August 2011, is seeking compensation “for the loss of the $1.5 billion value of its business and more which defendants destroyed,” according to a complaint filed yesterday. The defendants schemed with each other, raw material suppliers and certain lenders to flood the U.S. solar market with solar panels at below-cost prices, the Fremont, Calif.-based company said in the complaint. The case is Solyndra LLC v. Suntech Power Holdings Ltd., 12-05272, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco). The bankruptcy case is In re Solyndra LLC, 11-12799, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington).