MF Global general estate may not cover customers

The roughly $290 million in general estate funds -- that is, money reserved for creditors that are not MF Global customers -- may not be enough to make customers whole, James Kobak, an attorney for trustee James Giddens, said at a customer meeting in New York on Thursday.

Giddens has estimated that about $1.2 billion is missing from customer accounts at the brokerage. Some customers have argued that they should be allowed to make up for that shortfall by recovering money from the non-customer creditor pool.

"We might support that in certain circumstances, but at this point there simply isn't a substantial amount of general property available to make up for shortfalls," Kobak said.

(Reporting by Nick Brown; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)