Court proceeds with CFTC case against Corzine

Jon Corzine’s efforts to have a lawsuit filed against him by a federal regulator dismissed have come up short.

A U.S. District judge determined that the push to toss a case filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was “without merit.”

Judge Victor Marrero, in a ruling filed earlier this month, determined it was too early to say whether the regulator would be able to prove its case against the former head of the bankrupt firm MF Global and another former employee.

Corzine, a former New Jersey governor and senator, is facing a lawsuit claiming he failed to oversee the company, which collapsed under weighty bets on European debt in 2011. He and Edith O’Brien, a former MF Global treasurer, also face charges they allowed customer funds to be improperly tapped to keep the company afloat in its hectic final days.

Corzine has previously said he had no knowledge that those funds, which should have been kept segregated, were improperly accessed to keep firm accounts solvent before the bankruptcy. O’Brien refused to testify before a congressional panel on the matter in 2012, citing her Fifth Amendment rights.

Roughly $1.6 billion in customer funds went missing after the firm collapsed, but a trustee assigned to compensate investors has said he expects to fully repay those customers. No criminal charges have been filed in the wake of that collapse.

In September, Corzine had sought to dismiss the CFTC case, saying it relied on “irrelevant allegations calculated to sully Mr. Corzine’s character, as well as rambling hindsight criticisms of complex management decisions,” according to Bloomberg.