Posted on 07/29/2004 7:11:26 AM PDT by Pikamax
Kerrys raced to dump foreign stocks By David R. Guarino Read Guarino's Road to Boston Blog Thursday, July 29, 2004
John Kerry's family dumped millions of dollars of foreign holdings as he launched his White House bid, gobbling up Made in the USA stocks in a huge politically savvy international-to-domestic shift.
The investments, mostly in the name of Kerry's multimillionaire wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, sold stock in massive overseas players like Heineken, Sony, British Petroleum and Italian Telecom for red, white and blue companies like McDonald's, Dell and Kohls.
In all, the Kerrys dumped as much as $16 million worth of international stock and bought between $18 million and $32 million in domestic holdings between 2002 and 2003, records show.
The swaps, detailed in Kerry's financial disclosures for the presidential race, come to light as the Bay State senator tonight wraps himself in Americana to accept the Democratic Party nomination.
The senator's campaign said the investments are managed not by the Kerrys but by professional investment managers for the family trustees - of which Heinz Kerry is only one.
Marla Romash, a senior adviser to Kerry, said the financial decisions aren't political.
``The trustees and Mrs. Heinz Kerry have asked these investment managers, who make their own investment decisions, only to take appropriate steps to ensure that investments are responsible and financially prudent,'' Romash said. ``The trustees review these investments periodically with the managers to ensure that these investments are responsible as well as financially prudent.''
But the timing of the sales appears to be an anomaly among a relatively consistent investment pattern.
Through most of Kerry's federal disclosure forms, the Heinz Kerry trusts - which invest some of the massive inheritance after the death of her first husband, Sen. H. John Heinz III, more than a decade ago - show steady investments and sales of overseas assets.
In the spring of 2002, as Kerry seriously began weighing a presidential run, there appeared to be a marked increase in sales of overseas holdings.
The forms, which only list a range of figures, show the trusts sold between $7.2 million and $16.1 million in assets that year. The trust reported dividends of as much as $68,000 on the sales.
Among the assets dropped were: Cadbury Schweppes, the British candy and soda maker - with between $50,001 and $100,000 in stock sold in March 2002; Japan's Canon, Sony and Toyota - with more than $100,000 in each sold in March 2002; and France's Vivendi, Total Fina, Suez and Compagnie De Saint-Gobain.
The records also show the trust sold between $250,001 and $500,000 of BNP Paribas stock in April 2002, before the French bank was ensnared in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal at the United Nations.
Later that year and in 2003, the trusts began bolstering its domestic holdings - buying more than $50,000 in Harley Davidson stock, more than $100,000 in Costco, more than $250,000 in Kohls, Raytheon, and Kraft Foods, and as much as $1 million in Dell and McDonald's.
So, Kerry owned a CHUNK of the French bank that funneled the oil for palaces money? How f'ing perfect is THAT??
Well, you can expect to see this on page 677 of the New York Times on November 3, 2004, but only if Kerry loses.
I hate to nitpick (well, not really), but they'll never print this.
The times is the newspaper of record dotcha know. They print all "the news thats fit to print", just ask Jason Blair. If Kerry wins, you'll find out that W's 15th cousin twice removed owns 5 shares of stock in the investment firm that made the despicable decision to sell those pesky stocks, so its all GEORGE BUSH'S FAULT.
too bad one of the companies that he bailed out on didn't go tits-up; maybe they could martha-ize him.
This is good news because he's basically helping our economy by buying American, yes? What's good for our economy is good for "the people" and good for the Bush administration.
This is just stupid. I doubt anyone cares about his personal finances unless he was making his money selling drugs, children or arms to terrorists. Plenty of people own stocks in foreing companies. It just good risk diversification.
The extreme example of avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest is Alan Greenspan, who keeps all of his personal financial assets in T-bills, by definition earning the least interest possible, and having no opportunity to speculate in stocks.
The polar opposite is DiFi, who sits on the Senate Foreign Affairs ctte, and whose husband is palsy with the chicoms.
"Makes ya puke" bump.
Well, I wonder if J. FORBES Kerry, and Terreza HEINZ Kerry will put their combined Billions in blind trusts if he makes it to the WH?
If not, huge conflict that would make the Halliburton cat-calling seem like kindergarten!
bttt
don't forget he created a tax loophole just for Heinz Corporation
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