Jefferies Probed Archegos Cash Plea: ‘What’s the Emergency?’ (1)

It was March 24, 2021, and a Jefferies Financial Group risk manager was wondering why Archegos Capital Management seemed in such a rush to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars in excess cash from its trading account.

“What’s the emergency? Why?” Jennifer Miranda remembered thinking.

“I wanted to understand and there seemed to be an urgency about the call,” Miranda, a Jefferies managing director, testified Thursday in Manhattan federal court about her subsequent call with Scott Becker, then Archegos’ head of risk management.

What Miranda didn’t know was that Archegos was in the middle of a furious campaign of ...