About a dozen years ago, one of my sons was looking for particularly bad penny stocks to short sell. He pointed out that many of these flimsy companies were incorporated in Nevada, and that often the same people would show up on multiple boards of directors.
So, he asked me to look over one company’s SEC filing, and lo and behold, one of the officers or directors was Bill Richardson. I laughed and did a search on filings with his name... I think he was on the boards of a half-dozen of these fly-by-night penny stock companies.
He wasn’t worried about the appearance of impropriety. Instead, he was focused on monetizing what was left of his modest political fame.
So, I find it entirely believable that he ran a long-standing shady kickback operation.
One of the side-effects of having a totally biased media, is the propping up of mediocre to extremely bad Democrat politicians. This is one of the biggest factors leading to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden being the last two Democrat nominees. They both had disqualified themselves multiple times from ever being trusted with power.