Posted on 08/25/2002 2:26:05 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
The Democrats and the mainstream media are persistently trying to link the Republicans to the Enron and other corporate scandals as elections approach this fall. But it is becoming clear that the Democrats have more to hide, and that they are using their razor thin majority in the Senate, along with support from the media, to help them obscure the truth.
We have previously documented some of the evidence showing that while the Republicans may have received more money from Enron than the Democrats, the Clinton administration did far more for Enron in exchange for the money. For example, Enron got government loans and guarantees for the Dabhol Power plant in India to the tune of six hundred million dollars from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. And the Clinton administration threatened to cut off foreign aid to Mozambique if it didn’t sign a pipeline deal with Enron.
While the Democrats have been eager to investigate Enron, there has been no interest on their part to hear from former Clinton Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin. Rubin has been the Chairman of Citigroup since 1999. Citigroup is a major creditor of Enron, with loans outstanding of an estimated billion dollars. Evidence was revealed in recent hearings that senior officers at Citigroup, according to the New York Times, "misrepresented the full nature of a transaction with Enron...so that the energy company could ignore accounting requirements and hide its true financial condition..."
The evidence shows that Citigroup established several offshore shell corporations to help Enron hide billions of dollars of debt. And when things started to collapse for Enron, Mr. Rubin stepped in on their behalf. Enron’s problems first became public knowledge last October, and on November 8th, they restated their earnings showing their figures had been off by over a half billion dollars. That day, Rubin called Peter Fisher, the undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance, and asked him what he thought of the idea of calling the credit rating agencies on Enron’s behalf.
Fisher rejected it, and Rubin then contacted the managing director of Moody’s, a major credit rating agency, asking for a higher credit rating for Enron. Anything to keep from revealing the true condition of the company. To the New York Times, this was an unfortunate misstep by Rubin that "inadvertently gave comfort to the White House and to some conservative commentators’ by adding a prominent Democratic name to the list of Enron’s friends."
Senator Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, has left the decision on whether or not to call Rubin to testify to Senator Carl Levin who chairs the Subcommittee on Investigations and has said he has no interest in having Rubin testify. Lieberman, a presidential hopeful, appears to be ducking his responsibility. Could this be because he and a group he founded have received a lot of money from Enron related interests, including Citigroup, which has been the largest single contributor for the past five years?
It's worth reading all the replies and following all the links in those two, there is extensive documentation and research offered.
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