Bush Is No Good Trade

According to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records, on four separate occasions Gov. George W. Bush disregarded federal statutes by failing to file insider stock trade reports on a timely basis, back-dating one trade by some four months. Moreover, one key trade just a few weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait -- but reported some eight months late after the Gulf War was over -- netted Bush close to $1 million in profit as he sold stock in Harken Energy, an oil company doing business in the Middle East wherein some of his father's largest contributors also maintained substantial positions.

The SEC under President Bush carried out an incomplete investigation of the younger Bush's pre-Gulf War trade in 1991 after key presidential advisor George Jr. claimed that he filed a report, but that the SEC had most likely lost it. (No one has really asked whether the governor bothered to use registered mail to verify receipt of the documents.)

According to an Oct. 28, 1991, Time Magazine report, SEC spokesman John Heine said, "as far as I know, nobody ever found the 'lost' filing." And, strangely, Bush refused comment to Time regarding either the incident or his involvement with Harken.

The governor also did not reveal the blatant conflicts of interest involved, since the chairman of the SEC was Richard Breedon, former lawyer with Houston firm Baker and Botts and deputy counsel to Bush's father when he was vice president. Breedon received his SEC appointment after the elder Bush became president.

The SEC investigation of George W. was led by general counsel James R. Doty who, according to a UPI report, mysteriously neglected to interview any of the Harken directors. Moreover, Doty had previously served as George W. Bush's personal lawyer in the deal involving his Texas Rangers purchase. So, in the end, the younger Bush was cleared of insider trade wrongdoing by his personal attorney and by his father's vice-presidential counsel, a virtual impossibility for the average U.S. citizen.

That the mainstream media has refused to question Bush regarding what voters might consider a mockery of the criminal investigative process is a story in and of itself -- especially considering it concerns how a possible future president might enforce U.S. laws if he had also broken those statutes.

Consider that Americans who currently hold stocks or mutual funds would never -- by virtually no stretch of the imagination -- be able to obtain access to corporate insider information that could turn a million dollars profit. But reporters following Bush have not broached the subject during the campaign.

Most reports involving Bush's insider oil stock trades refer only to his highly controversial June 22, 1990, million dollar trade made six weeks before Gulf War hostilities broke out in Kuwait -- a trade which was reported eight months later. However, SEC documents between 1986 and 1993 show that Bush acquired 212,152 shares of Harken stock on Nov. 1, 1986, at the time he merged his Spectrum 7 company with Harken. But the future governor did not report the transaction until April 7, 1987 -- more than five months later.

When Bush filed late on April 7,1987, SEC filings show he had purchased another 80,000 shares on March 10, 1987. But strangely, two weeks later, an April 22 filing noted that the 80,000-share purchase was backdated to Dec. 10, 1986. When questioned by the media, Bush's attorney said it was the same 80,000 shares but he could not explain the discrepancy regarding the purchase dates or why Bush even reported the trade two times.

Another SEC filing, this from June 6, 1989, showed that Bush purchased another 25,000 shares of Harken but again waited more than four months to report the transaction.

The Houston Post, recognizing Bush's late SEC filings, noted that he "took eight months to notify the government of his sale of stock in a company on whose board he served" and "also missed the filing deadline for reporting other insider trades involving Harken Energy."

Documents obtained by the Post showed "additional instances in which Bush ... ran afoul of the SEC rule requiring notification." And George W. described himself as a "small, insignificant" Harken stockholder; but news reports examining SEC documents identified Bush as the third largest non-institutional investor.

In October 1991, Time Magazine questioned why the tiny country of Bahrain would stake so much of its financial future on Harken Energy, which it labeled an "obscure, money-losing company with no refineries and no experience in offshore oil exploration." But the magazine also noted that oil-insiders speculated that Bahrain's rulers saw the arrangement as a way to gain influence with the Bush administration.

Mysteriously, primary reporters have also ignored what could point to a nexus regarding foreign policy and personal financial interests. Interestingly, the Village Voice in January 1991 reported that in 1990 the Bush administration signed an agreement with Bahrain that chose the small country as the permanent principal allied base in the Middle East, although it was some 200 miles away from the hostilities in Iraq and Kuwait.

The military-base deal came after Harken announced its Jan. 30, 1990, joint oil-drilling venture with Bahrain. So President Bush's key contributors and his son George W. were carrying on personal financial business with Bahrain at the same time decisions were being made regarding the possibility of a war in the Gulf.

And neither the president nor his adviser, George Jr., let the press know that Bahrain had been permitted to infuse $7.7 million in foreign cash to hire U.S. public relations firm Hill & Knowlton to lobby Congress and the American people; a stunning variety of opinion-forming devices and techniques were employed to inflame U.S. patriotic passions of war while personal financial interests were on the line.

On May 21, 1990, less than ten weeks before Saddam Hussein's troops invaded Kuwait to initiate the Middle East hostilities -- but just four weeks before Bush unloaded the bulk of his Harken stock -- a renegotiated corporate loan agreement featured an unusually high interest rate of 12 percent, less credit for acquisitions, a $750,000 debt fee and even requirements by some of Harken's major stockholders to guarantee $22.5 million in debt, according to Associated Press.

Did Bush know of impending losses when he sold his stock on June 22, 1990, since Federal securities law prohibits corporate insiders from trading "on the basis of" material information that is not publicly known? Bush denied the charge in spite of his positions on the Harken Energy board of directors, audit committee and stock restructuring panel. He added that he had no idea Harken was going to get an audit report full of red ink until weeks after he had made his stock sale.

But U.S. News & World Report said, "there is substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits. ... Harken's SEC filings make it clear that the company's directors knew radical steps were necessary." The magazine added that "one informed source says Harken's creditors had threatened to foreclose on the company if substantial debt payments were not made." Shortly thereafter, Bush cashed out of Harken.

The April 4, 1991,Wall Street Journal added that "Mr. Bush didn't return their phone calls seeking comment, and the Bush White House said 'it doesn't comment on the activities of the president's children.'"

According to the Washington Post, Harken's audit committee, of which Bush was a member, met with Mikel Faulkner and

auditors from Arthur Andersen & Co.

, Harken's accountants, on June 11, 1990 -- just 11 days before Bush sold his stock on June 22. When asked for a copy of the June 11 minutes or permission to inspect them, the company declined to make the records available.

Bush's insider transaction yielding a profit of $848,560 -- some 250 percent profit on the stock's original value -- came a week prior to the end of a quarter in which the company lost $23 million. The quarterly report was released just a few days after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the Harken stock plummeted. However, as reported in a 1992 Mother Jones report, Bush attended a meeting regarding a revised stock offering in May 1990 working with Smith Barney's financial consultants concerning corporate restructuring.

In an Oct. 11, 1994, UPI report, Bush also claimed that he was not aware of Harken's poor financial condition when he sold the stock, but UPI said that the Dallas Morning News reported on the same day that a corporate official who served with Bush on the audit committee at Harken felt otherwise; Stuart Watson told the Dallas paper that he and Bush were constantly made aware of the company's finances. "You bet we were," said Watson. "We were both trying to keep that company on the straight and narrow."

On March 16, 1992, U.S. News echoed Watson's statement, reporting that "according to documents on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, his position on the Harken (restructuring) committee gave Bush detailed knowledge of the company's deteriorating financial condition."

Chuck McDonald, spokesman for Texas Gov. Ann Richards' campaign, said that SEC chief counsel in the Bush investigation -- James Doty, George W.'s former attorney -- never talked to George W., Watson or other Harken officials in its 1991 probe. He said, "Was this a real investigation, or was it a whitewash of an insider stock sale by the son of the sitting president?" UPI, which reported McDonald's statement, went on to note that "while Bush claims the SEC investigation absolved him of illegal insider trading, he has refused to release the investigation files."

Harken founder, Phil Kendrick, noted that the company's "annual reports and press releases get me totally befuddled. There's been so much promotion, manipulation and inside deal making." And even Harken chief executive Mikel Faulkner, an accountant, offered advice for those trying to decipher the financial statements: "Good luck. They're a mess."

Press accounts note that Bush requested a letter from the SEC, issued in October 1993, The letter, signed by SEC Associate Director Bruce A. Hiler, said that "the investigation has been terminated as to the conduct of Mr. Bush and that, at this time, no enforcement is contemplated with respect to him." But the letter also stated that "it must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result."

On Oct. 18, 1993, the Bush administration SEC said it would not bring a case against George W. Bush.

Gov. Bush speaks about his outstanding business record on the campaign stump; however, in 1989, U.S. News & World Report said, "Harken Energy lost over $12 million against revenues of $1 billion." Harken President Mikel Faulkner said that in addition to Bush's position as a director at $2,000 per meeting, stock options worth $131,250, 5 percent loans and 40 percent discounts on stock purchases, he was also a consultant to Harken for "investor relations and equity placement" at a salary of $80,000 per year from 1986 until 1989, when his salary jumped to $120,000.

The board was equally generous to Bush in 1990 as "the company lost another $40 million and shareholder equity plunged to $3 million -- down from more than $70 million in 1988." Faulkner declined to say what services George W. has performed as a consultant.

In March 1992, U.S. News said that "Despite repeated requests for interviews, George W. declined to discuss Harken or the reason for his stock sale, saying through an assistant that he 'does not want to read about himself.'" But some might ask whether American voters have a right to know whether a possible president would strictly enforce federal statutes or appoint lenient attorneys with suspect ethical standards leading to fixed politically sensitive investigations.

Moreover, should Bush -- a director of the corporation -- be accountable when huge losses are reported over a period of time, especially as a presidential candidate purporting to have an outstanding entrepreneurial business record at every presidential campaign stop? The answers have real implications regarding presidential character, morality and personal ethics.

Author and commentator Kevin Phillips offered a perceptive look at the Texas governor in the February 2000 issue of Harpers magazine when he said, "We can fairly ask whether George W. Bush is anything more than another scion who has made a decent governor during a period of prosperity and easy growth, and whether the United States can afford nominees who are to presidential politics what legacies are to college fraternities."

Overnight Guests at Governor’s Mansion Added $2.2 Million to Bush Campaign
Forbes, Walter

Walter A. Forbes is a former chairman of Cendant Corp., a New York-based global provider of real estate, travel and direct-marketing-related consumer and business services. Forbes resigned as chairman under immense pressure in 1998 during an accounting scandal. Authorities are trying to determine the level of involvement by top executives in Cendant's accounting irregularities. Forbes has repaid nearly $2.3 million in travel- and entertainment-related expenses.

U.S. Accuses Top Cendant Executives of Fraud

The New York Times
By Floyd Norris
March 1, 2001

Walter A. Forbes, who built a small company into the huge Cendant Corporation, was an active participant in a fraud that resulted in the company's reporting more than $500 million in phony profits, the government charged yesterday.

Mr. Forbes, the former chairman of Cendant, and E. Kirk Shelton, the former vice chairman, were indicted on fraud charges by a federal grand jury in Newark yesterday. At the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil fraud case against the two men.

The charges, which both denied, contend that the fraud went on for more than a decade, with company officials systematically altering financial statements to increase profits to impress investors. The charges against the two men appear to be largely based on the testimony of three other officials of the company who pleaded guilty to similar charges last year.

"Some call this kind of manipulation `earnings management,' " said Robert J. Cleary, the United States attorney in Newark. "Investors who watched helplessly as their share values plunged call it fraud."

Mr. Forbes and Mr. Shelton built CUC International, which began as a membership organization offering consumer products and travel services, into a large company that took over numerous other companies, culminating in a 1997 merger with HFS Inc. to form Cendant. The merged company controlled brands like Avis rental cars, Days Inn motels, Century 21 real estate and the Jackson Hewitt tax-preparation service.

"Soon after the Cendant merger," the S.E.C. said in its complaint, which was also filed in Newark, "Forbes and Shelton explicitly congratulated each other on being masterful `financial engineers' " who had assured their continued success "by duping HFS into a merger with CUC." The S.E.C. did not say where it had obtained that information.

At the time of the merger, Mr. Forbes was chairman and chief executive of CUC and Mr. Shelton was president and chief operating officer.

Mr. Forbes issued a statement yesterday through his lawyer, Brendan V. Sullivan, saying, "I am totally innocent of the charges brought against me and will fight them in court." Mr. Shelton's lawyers issued a statement denying the accusations and saying, "When all the evidence emerges, Mr. Shelton's innocence will be clear."

The indictment of the two top executives reflects an increasing willingness of prosecutors to bring criminal charges in cases where they conclude that investors were defrauded by a deliberate falsification of books. Garth H. Drabinsky, the former chief executive of Livent, a theater production company, was indicted in 1999, and Albert J. Bergonzi and Jay P. Gilbertson, former co-presidents of HBO & Company, a medical software concern, were indicted in September. Mr. Drabinsky is fighting extradition from Canada, and the case of the two HBO & Company executives has not come to trial.

Richard Walker, the director of enforcement for the S.E.C., said: "The results of our cases show that financial fraud is not confined to very small and obscure companies, but is increasingly prevalent in large companies traded on major stock markets as well. Last year, we brought more enforcement actions involving financial fraud and reporting abuses than ever before, and our inventory of such cases remains large." He said 19 chief executives faced S.E.C. civil cases in 2000.

The S.E.C. is now known to be investigating accusations of fraud or improper financial reporting at such major companies as Waste Management, Lucent Technologies and Xerox.

The securities agency said the accounting fraud at Cendant was the largest ever prosecuted, and it put investor losses at $19 billion.

Mr. Forbes, 58, of New Canaan, Conn., became chief executive of Comp-U-Card International, as CUC was then known, in 1976. He cultivated a reputation as a visionary who foresaw the possibility of consumers shopping by computer decades before wide use of the Internet made that possible. Mr. Shelton, 46, of Darien, Conn., joined the company in 1981 and became president in 1991.

But even as the company grew rapidly, the government contends that it was fraud, not operating results, that produced much of the profit.

Cosmo Corigliano, formerly CUC's chief financial officer; Anne Pember, formerly CUC's controller; and Casper Sabatino, a CUC accountant, pleaded guilty to fraud charges last June but have not been sentenced. They admitted to participating in the filing of fraudulent financial statements for many years and said that senior officials had directed the fraud. Mr. Corigliano said fraud had been going on at CUC since he joined it in 1983, the year the company went public.

According to the indictment, CUC executives maintained what they called a "cheat sheet" that "listed amounts the conspirators could add to CUC's reported earnings for the year by means of various fraudulent entries." Each quarter, the government charged, they would use the sheet to adjust quarterly earnings to meet Wall Street expectations, and then each year they would make additional adjustments to make the fraud less clear to auditors.

The Cendant matter has already become one of the most expensive in history. The company has settled shareholder suits for $2.8 billion, and the former auditors for CUC, Ernst & Young, have agreed to pay $335 million. Cendant's current management is pursuing civil litigation against the auditors, contending that they knew of the fraud and covered it up, accusations the auditors deny. Ernst & Young has retained David Boies as its lawyer in the civil case.

With charges now filed against the entire top management of CUC from before the merger, a question now is whether Ernst & Young will face government charges. Neither the S.E.C. nor the United States attorney's office would comment on that. A spokesman for Ernst & Young said it was cooperating with the investigation.

The charges covered by the indictment said the "cheat sheet" was maintained by Mr. Corigliano and did not cite other documents linking Mr. Forbes and Mr. Shelton to fraud. The S.E.C. charges said Mr. Shelton regularly reviewed and authorized fraudulent changes to the books, while Mr. Forbes did so less frequently and sometimes acted through Mr. Shelton.

There has been speculation that prosecutors might offer Mr. Shelton a deal to testify against Mr. Forbes, but Mr. Shelton's lawyers, Stephen E. Kaufman and Martin J. Auerbach, showed no indication yesterday that they were interested in such a deal. They said Mr. Shelton "worked with an unflinching commitment to honesty and the truth during his 17 years" at the company and "did not participate in the fraud that occurred."

The indictments against Mr. Forbes and Mr. Shelton of one count of conspiracy and one count of wire fraud carry maximum penalties of 10 years in prison and fines of $500,000.

The potential civil liability is great. Both men made large amounts of money selling CUC stock when share prices were high, and the S.E.C. asked that they be ordered to "provide a complete accounting of and to disgorge the unjust enrichment realized," plus interest. The commission said that Mr. Forbes sold 1.2 million shares, and Mr. Shelton nearly 600,000 shares, from January 1995 through April 1998, when the fraud was exposed.

The government contends that the fraud began by 1985, however, with Mr. Forbes involved from the beginning, and that Mr. Shelton joined it no later than 1991. So sales of stock before 1995 could also be included in assessing the men's profits.

The large potential liability appears to be what is holding up a settlement by Mr. Corigliano and Ms. Pember of charges filed by the S.E.C. against them. Both sold substantial quantities of stock during the period in which they have admitted helping to prepare false financial reports.

CUC gained a big Wall Street following in the years when it seemed to be growing rapidly. The company went public in 1983 at $1.21 a share, adjusted for subsequent splits. After the merger with HFS that created Cendant, the stock price rose to a high of $41.69 on April 6, 1998, shortly before the fraud was discovered. Mr. Forbes, Mr. Shelton and seven others resigned on July 28 that year.

Shares of Cendant fell 5 cents yesterday, to $13.08, twice the low of $6.50 it reached in the fall of 1998 but less than a third of the peak price.

The company, whose chief executive now is Henry R. Silverman, the former head of HFS, issued a statement saying it "supported any effort seeking to hold accountable all persons responsible."

Jeb Bush

Ideon Corporation

Jeb Bush - Board of Directors - Bush sat on Ideon's audit committee, the watchdog of financial and management integrity.

Cendant Employees Awake to Discover A 15% Average Loss On Their 401k Stake

Cendant - Jackson Hewitt Inc. And Arthur Andersen To Develop New Tax Software System
"Arthur Andersenwill help us enhance our current core tax engine and upgrade our ProFiler system to be faster and much more efficient," said Jackson Hewitt Inc. President and COO, Dan Tarantin. "The new system will provide numerous benefits to our franchisees, including the option of preparing returns in either a forms-based method or via our traditional decision-tree interview."

"Given their extensive tax industry expertise, we’re excited to have Arthur Andersen’s assistance in the upgrading of our technology," said Tarantin. "Due to our tremendous growth over the last few years our customer base has doubled, and the newly enhanced ProFiler system will help to support our growing franchise base."
[end of partial transcript]

Jeb Bush joined board of company mired in trouble

"Kahn in early 1995 even wrote the former president: "First let me tell you how happy we are to have your son, Jeb, on our board of directors. . . . He is a great asset to the team."

Then there was the paycheck. Ideon paid directors a whopping $50,000 a year, plus $2,000 per meeting and $500 per telephone conference. That was the largest sum paid to directors of any major public company in Jacksonville, and possibly in all of Florida.

What's not to like? Everything, it turns out. Ideon already was in trouble when Bush joined the board in January 1995.

By 1996, Kahn was out. Ideon was then sold to CUC International. Ideon's directors faced lawsuits claiming stock manipulation. Now, more than two years later, Cendant -- the successor company to CUC -- is struggling to recover after discovering years of accounting fraud attributed, in part, to CUC's purchase of Ideon.

Politically, the Ideon aftermath worries the Bush campaign. In fact, Bush assembled a 15-page Ideon statement and visited major Florida newspapers to defend his role.

Kahn at first had grandiose plans for a quirky array of new services -- selling credit card perks for golfers, a "Family Protection Network" membership club to help find missing children and a line of Vatican-approved art objects. The services were never fully tested. They flopped and Ideon began gushing red ink.

Some of Kahn's ideas were a stretch. He wanted the pope's blessing to introduce a Catholic credit card. He also wasted a lot of company funds. Kahn once bought $10,000 place mats for the company jet. He hired consultants like convicted Wall Street felon Martin Siegel.

Bush said he was angry when he heard about Siegel. "I couldn't believe it," he said.

Despite a second-quarter 1995 loss of $46.7-million, Bush said Ideon's board initially accepted Kahn's free-spending ways. The directors counted on revenue growth. They did demand Siegel be fired. Bush said he pushed to dismiss Kahn and sell the company.

But lawsuits against Ideon directors, as well as the company's own regulatory filings, paint a different picture. As directors, Bush and his Republican fund-raiser friend Thomas Petway sat on Ideon's audit committee, the watchdog of financial and management integrity. Many of Bush's fellow outside directors -- who were supposed to represent shareholder interests -- had cut cozy business deals with Ideon. In some cases, they got six-figure consulting fees on top of their directors pay.

..By August 1996, Ideon was sold for $375-million to CUC. The sale included indemnification for directors against lawsuits. Good news, considering the lawsuits charge Ideon and its directors with stock manipulation. The cases were settled early this year for $15-million. Bush and the other directors paid nothing.

Kahn denied that board members were in the dark about company spending. "I was not alone," he told Business Week magazine last year. "The board knew about everything. . . . They set me up for being the fall guy, not that I'm without sin. I was hung out to dry."
[end of partial transcript]
A Pathological Probe of A Pool of Pervasive Perversion - By Abraham J. Briloff, Ph.D., CPA - Emanuel Saxe Distinugished Professor Emeritus - Baruch College, New York.
"On August 28, 1998, Arthur Andersen & Co. (“AA”) rendered its “Report to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors of Cendant Corporation” reporting on its forensic audit of CUC International, Inc., in the wake of disclosures in mid-April that accounting irregularities had been discovered at CUC (which merged in December 1997, with HFS to form Cendant)."

Plan Calls For Jail Time For Execs
When the government decides to prosecute a case, it can take years for it to come to trial. For example, four years ago, Cendant Corporation was shocked to discover that it had acquired a company, CUC International, that had inflated itself by $400 million. Since then, three lower-level workers have pleaded guilty to wire fraud but the president, Kirk Shelton, and the chairman, Walter Forbes, have yet to go to trial.

THE BUSH FAMILY, WE DO CRIME BETTER

Who Bought Bush’s Stock?

New York Press
By Christopher Caldwell
Hill of Beans
Volume 15, Issue 29
July 15, 2002
SOURCE

"How can Mr. Bush crack the whip on Big Business," asks The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, "when he’s a wholly owned subsidiary of it?" Before we journalists batter our way into the crack den that is American business corruption, can we come to an agreement that we won’t deploy cliches? When people say "wholly owned subsidiary," what on earth do they mean? If one entity is "wholly owned" by another, isn’t it by definition subsidiary to it?

But not even bad prose can obscure that the corporate scandals are hatching a catastrophe for Republicans. They will probably destroy this administration. Let’s dispose of the red herrings first. The President’s sale of $850,000 in Harken Energy stock, just days before it tanked in 1990, is not going to get him in trouble for insider trading. Yes, his sale came just eight days before Harken announced a weak quarter–but for an insider-trading rap to be proved, it must be shown that President Bush had "material information." He is not criminally culpable for having known, as a board member, that his company was spiraling down the toilet. And, yes, the stock’s value fell from $4 a share when he sold it to a dollar and change just weeks later. But it also later rose to $8. Harken see-sawed enough that it will never be certain whether Bush bailed out or "sold into good news," as his spokeswoman Karen Hughes has always insisted.

What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day’s work in his life.

Let’s retell that story as briefly as we can. Bush started an oil company called Arbusto in the late 1970s. He was driving it into the ground when, in 1982, he was rescued by Philip Uzielli, a Princeton crony of his dad’s troubleshooter James Baker. Uzielli invested a million dollars in Arbusto, which was then worth less than $500,000. In return, he got 10 percent interest in the company. No, that’s not a misprint. Mismatches between equity and ownership–always in Dubya’s favor–are a hallmark of our President’s financial rise.

Even after Uzielli’s turbocharging, Arbusto was going under. Before it did, it "merged" with a company called Spectrum 7, which took on Bush as head executive. As that company, too, nose-dived, Harken Energy proved unaccountably eager to "merge" with it. It offered a half-million dollars in stock and $120,000 a year to get the Vice President’s son on the board. It also "loaned" Bush hundreds of thousands of dollars below prime rate.

Weeks after his father was elected president, Bush got involved in the purchase of the Texas Rangers. He would eventually sell his Harken shares to cover the loan that allowed him to help buy the team. He put up under 2 percent of the purchase price ($606,000 out of $46 million), but the deal called for him to be given almost 12 percent of the stock, once the other partners cleared their initial investments. Generous of them! In 1998 Bush sold his stake in the team–pumped up by a $135-million publicly-financed-but-privately-owned stadium, bestowed as a gift from the taxpayers of Arlington, TX–for $15 million.

For decades now, the "small government" Republican Party has been slamming the corrupt conduct of, say, trial lawyers who just suck money out of the economy and put it in their pockets in the name of the ideal of "representing the little guy." When they talk this way, I’m all ears. But, Jesus, this is what they have to offer in its place?

It is no use to say this is an old story and that people don’t care about this stuff. In the flush times leading up until the 2000 elections, it’s true, voters were indifferent. But as soon as people start seeing their pension funds decimated by collapsing stock values, they simply cannot get enough of it. Don’t take my word for it. CBS polled voters last week and found 42 percent paying "a lot" of attention, and 37 percent paying "some." That’s a total of 79 percent, a huge number–higher than the 70 percent who paid attention to the Clinton sex revelations in the very first days the news broke in January 1998.

What’s more, Americans believe the corruption is not a matter of a few bad apples but a society-wide state of affairs. While it’s certainly true that Martha Stewart has been scapegoated by bourgeois-hating radicals and feminist hags, who see in her punctiliousness and house-pride an assault on their lifestyle, the message Americans take from her insider-trading troubles is that if you scratch a rich person–any rich person–you’ll find some kind of game-rigging and corporate corruption. To CBS’ question, "Do you think U.S. executives are honest?" the answer was No, by 67 percent to 27.

Where institutional dishonesty is suspected, a particular kind of political outrage results–the kind that is resistant to sweet talk. Last week, President Bush tried to tell us that corporate corruption might have had the silver lining of making us a more ethical people. "I believe people have taken a step back," he said, "and asked, ‘What’s important in life? You know, the bottom line and this corporate America stuff, is that important? Or is serving your neighbor, loving your neighbor like you’d like to be loved yourself?’" No decent human being could disagree. But no half-intelligent human being could fail to note that such things are a lot easier to say when you’ve already banked your own 30 or 50 mil.

There is no end to the political hay Democrats can make with corporate corruption. Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times suggests this as a campaign line: "Do you want to turn over your Social Security to the same people who gave us WorldCom and Enron?" Howard Wolfson, the former Hillary campaign flack who’s now the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, is tutoring his candidates on ways to link the finance scandals to everything–schools, prescription drugs, Social Security, you name it.

There is nothing protecting the President from electoral vulnerability except the fact that we’re at war. And this is where Bush’s sale of Harken stock takes an interesting twist. The important issue might not be when he sold it but who bought it. This is information that Senate Democrats are seeking desperately; Bush refuses to reveal it, and it is not even clear if the Securities and Exchange Commission knows the buyer’s identity from its insider trading investigation. If they know, they haven’t released it.

But let’s speculate. An editorial on Harken in last week’s Wall Street Journal noted "interesting Saudi connections on the finance side." One of Bush’s early investors in Arbusto was James Bath, agent of Salem bin Laden (Osama’s half-brother) in the United States. (This is not proof, as certain left-wing publications have implied, that Bath’s money was the bin Ladens’ to begin with.) In the months after Bush came onto the Harken board, according to a 1999 Journal report, a Saudi financier named Abdullah Taha Bakhsh bought a 17 percent stake in the company. Bakhsh’s American representative Talat Othman was given a seat on the board and met with then-President Bush at the White House. And the "good news" into which now-President Bush claimed to be selling his Harken shares was an oil-exploration deal with the government of Bahrain–a total (but lucrative) flop that was arranged despite Harken’s never having done any foreign oil exploration before. In fact, the ex-president’s ne’er-do-well son appears to have been used by the Harken board as "Arab bait," much as Democrats sold the promise of photographs with Clinton family nobodies for cash from Asian businessmen. ("Rook! That’s me with Lodger Crinton!")

To be fair (if only for a moment), back in the early 1990s, Saudi Arabia was known as our unsavory but solid longtime ally against communism, not as the gang of rich fascists who spawned Al Qaeda and are now obstructing our war against it. But until the identity of the Harken purchaser is revealed, probing the issue will be a no-lose situation for the Democrats. They can ask whether George Bush’s fortune has its roots in Arab oil money. They can ask whether the corrupt Bank of Credit and Commerce International was involved. They can ask why it was that the entire bin Laden clan was allowed to be flown out of the country in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. They won’t accuse Bush of intentionally bungling the war on terror to please the Saudis. But they may note that it was tragic that, at a time when thousands of Americans were murdered by extremists whose only ultimate means of support was oil, we had an oil man in the White House.

Despite Promise, Bush Sold Harken Stock
"But a securities expert said the document calls into question his lawyers' account to the SEC.

"Bush's signing of the April 2, 1990, lockup agreement undercuts his lawyers' explanation for the early sale of his Harken stock," said Houston lawyer Thomas R. Ajamie, an expert in securities law whose firm is advising companies that did business with the failed energy giant Enron. "If his accountant told him that he needed to sell stock to pay a debt obligation for his interest in the Texas Rangers, it does not make sense that he would subsequently sign an agreement promising not to sell his shares of Harken stock for six months."

BUSH FAMILY BUSINESS PLAN

George W. Bush - President.

During The So-Called Investigation:

George H.W. Bush was President.
Richard C. Breeden - "was SEC chairman under President Bush's father, former President George H.W. Bush"
Richard C. Breeden - "Also Served as an 'Assistant' to President George H.W. Bush"
Ex-SEC chairman Richard Breeden named "WorldCom" monitor
Robert Jordan, a founding partner of the Dallas law office of Baker Botts, represented Mr. Bush during a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into the allegations involving Mr. Bush's lucrative sale of stock in Harken, where he had been a director. Robert Jordan, is now ambassador Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is connected to the Harken scandal.
James R. Doty - "From May 1990 through December 1992, Mr. Doty was the General Counsel of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, Washington, D.C."
"As General Counsel, Mr. Doty was the chief legal officer of the Commission, responsible for advising the Commission and its staff with respect to interpretations involving questions of law, the conduct of administrative proceedings, the preparation of Commission comments to Congress on pending legislation and the drafting, in conjunction with the appropriate divisions and offices, of legislative proposals sponsored by the Commission."
James R. Doty - "who earlier represented Bush in his purchase of the Texas Rangers, made with the proceeds of his sale of Harken shares"
James R. Doty was a law partner with Robert Jordan.

Harvey L. Pitt - Former Arthur Andersen Attorney

"There is nothing rotten in the accounting profession."
Harvey Pitt, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission - January, 2002 - SOURCE

Harvey Pitt, the Bush administration's chief at the S.E.C., was actually an Arthur Andersen lawyer.
Harken Energy Accountants: Arthur Andersen. George W. Bush - Seated on Harken's Board of Directors and audit committee, and large shareholder while Arthur Andersen applied their talents to the books. Bush Violated Security Laws Four Times, SEC Report Says Harken's audit committee, of which Bush was a member, met with Mikel Faulkner and auditors from Arthur Andersen and Co. Harken's accountants, on June 11, 1990, just 11 days before Bush sold his stock on June 22. When asked for a copy of the June 11 minutes or permission to inspect them, the company declined to make the records available.
The S.E.C. Says: "Insider trading is illegal when a person trades a security while in possession of material nonpublic information in violation of a duty to withhold the information or refrain from trading."
Insider Trading and George W. Bush
A U S T I N, July 1-- The Securities and Exchange Commission defines insider trading as "Corporate officers, directors, and employees who traded the corporation's securities after learning of significant, confidential corporate developments". Bush sold $848,560 worth of Harken Energy stock on June 22, 1990, just one week before the company posted spectacular losses and the stock plunged sharply. When the losses were reported to the public on August 20, 1990, the stock plummeted.
According to documents from a two year investigation by the SEC, Bush served on the board of directors of Harken Energy Corporation and his position on a special Harken committee gave him detailed knowledge of the company's deteriorating financial condition. The SEC received word of Bush's trade ten months late.
The SEC states, "Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the Commission has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities".
Bush supporters point out that the stock's value went back up, eventually, and if Bush had held the stock, it would have made him more money. But, knowing when to sell is the golden goose of stock trading and using inside information is insider trading. The SEC investigated but decided not to punish Bush. After all, his dad was President and all five SEC Commissioners are appointed by the President. Furthermore, the SEC's general counsel had actually represented George W. in the Texas Rangers negotiation. Any doubts?
Bush Administration Has Tight Ties to Arthur Andersen
George W. Bush and Ashcroft think Arthur Andersen is the firm to review and clean up the FBI.
Bush Issues Warning On Hiring Andersen

Neil Bush

Neil Bush - Silverado Savings and Loan - Executive on Board of Directors. Signs point to mob involvement in savings and loan mess. Bush paid a $50,000 fine and was banned from banking activities for his role in taking down Silverado, which actually cost taxpayers $1.3 billion. A Resolution Trust Corporation Suit against Bush and other officers of Silverado was settled in 1991 for $26.5 million. Ernst & Young Pays $400 Million To Settle Thrift Regulators including Silverado Banking Savings and Loan.

Jonathan Bush

Jonathan Bush - Bush and Company - President & Chief Executive Officer. Massachusetts securities regulators have fined the stock brokerage firm owned by President Bush's brother Jonathan $30,000 and barred it from trading with the general public for one year because the company and Bush violated state registration laws.

Jeb Bush

Jeb Bush - Ideon Corporation - Board of Directors - Bush sat on Ideon's audit committee, the watchdog of financial and management integrity. Jeb Bush joined board of company mired in trouble. Ideon was sold to CUC International. Ideon's directors faced lawsuits claiming stock manipulation. Now, more than two years later, Cendant -- the successor company to CUC -- is struggling to recover after discovering years of accounting fraud attributed, in part, to CUC's purchase of Ideon. Consultants like convicted Wall Street felon Martin Siegel were used. Jeb Bush and his Republican fund-raiser friend Thomas Petway sat on Ideon's audit committee, the watchdog of financial and management integrity. Many of Bush's fellow outside directors -- who were supposed to represent shareholder interests -- had cut cozy business deals with Ideon. In some cases, they got six-figure consulting fees on top of their directors pay. By August 1996, Ideon was sold for $375-million to CUC. The sale included indemnification for directors against lawsuits. Good news, considering the lawsuits charge Ideon and its directors with stock manipulation. The cases were settled early this year for $15-million. Bush and the other directors paid nothing. On August 28, 1998, Arthur Andersen & Co. rendered its Report to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors of Cendant Corporation reporting on its forensic audit of CUC International, Inc., in the wake of disclosures in mid-April that accounting irregularities had been discovered at CUC.

George H.W. Bush

George H.W. Bush - Zapata Petroleum - George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography
The Zapata Offshore filings with the SEC between 1955 and 1959 are cryptic, and the SEC files on Zapata Offshore between 1960 and 1966, when Bush had exclusive control of the company, were destroyed by the SEC either in 1981, when Bush had just become vice president, or somewhat later, in October, 1983, according to various SEC officials. Bush nevertheless created a network of subsidiaries which was suspiciously complex. This topic is difficult to research because of the very convenient disappearance of the Zapata Offshore filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington for the year 1960-1966 which were "inadvertently" destroyed by a federal warehouse. This is the kind of convenient tampering with official records from which Bush has benefitted again and again over his career. Auditors for Zapata Petroleum were Arthur Andersen. Counsel were listed as Baker, Botts, Andrews & Shepherd of Houston, Texas. Transfer agents were J.P. Morgan & Co., Inc., of New York City.

Bush Issues Warning On Hiring Andersen

Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
July 16, 2002
Source

The James S. Brady Briefing Room

12:23 P.M. EDT

Partial Transcript:

Q Just to answer a lot of the questions that have been out there and to show, back-up your claims in the past that this is an open administration. Why not just ask the SEC to release all the documents behind the Harken investigation -- just to get it out there.

MR. FLEISCHER: Ron, you know, the SEC took a look at all the questions that were raised in the context of Harken and they have come to their conclusions. They have made their determinations and they made their judgments and they made their call. It's all been shared with you. And you have what they determined.

Q Why don't you want to have shared with us the basis that they used to come to that conclusion?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, Ron, you know, the lesson in Washington, there's no end to that type of question. It doesn't matter that the SEC has already looked into this in its entirety, shared its finding, shared its results with you and come to the conclusion that there's no "there" there.

Q Let me follow-up --

MR. FLEISCHER: The premise that you're asking is any time we ask for anything, we want to have full access to everything in a file. And that's just the precedent that is lacking in sense or merit, and especially in a case here where you know the conclusions, you know the reasons, you have everything you need, and it's all at your disposal.

Q Can I ask one more question? The President's accountant said yesterday that a Texas bank freed up $130,000 -- 130,000 shares of Harken stock that were being pledged for the loan the President took out for the Texas Rangers. Do you happen to know what the President did to get the collateral free?

MR. FLEISCHER: No, Ron, I'm not the President's accountant.

Q On Halliburton, Ari, you said from the podium that the Vice President believes that the lawsuit against him is without merit. I realize you're not going to comment on an ongoing SEC investigation. But isn't it also true that because of these things that one of the most experienced former CEOs in this administration has become something of a political liability, in that at the time when you're cracking down on corporate responsibility, the Vice President is not heard from, he's not talking about these issues. He can't be used as a vital spokesman of the administration.

MR. FLEISCHER: I thought I saw him on TV just yesterday or the day before giving a speech about corporate governance. So I just differ with your findings and with your premise.

Q That was a fundraiser, right, and we'd all stipulate that those don't get a lot of coverage, right?

MR. FLEISCHER: I saw him on TV, so obviously he got covered.

Q Wait a second, is that your only answer?

MR. FLEISCHER: I'm sorry, what was your next question?

...Q Thank you. Is the -- was he aware of circumstances or problems within Halliburton that could ultimately affect the financial position of the company prior to his selling of stock?

MR. FLEISCHER: As you know, these are issues that if the Securities and Exchange commission deems them appropriate to look into, they will look into.

...Q It was not on the wires, but it's all right. Next question. Does the President feel -- I know the President has been backing Harvey Pitt as president of the SEC -- does the President feel, though, that some of the criticism, some of the questions the Democrats have and John McCain have, does he feel some of those arguments are valid?

MR. FLEISCHER: No. The President listens to Arthur Levitt, for example. Arthur Levitt, the former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission appointed by President Clinton has commended Harvey Pitt for the superb job he is doing at the SEC; for the enhanced number of corporate wrongdoers who Harvey Pitt has now banned from serving as members of board of directors of corporate companies or in corporate positions anymore; for the amount of money that Harvey Pitt has taken back from business executives who took that money as a result of filing phoney books.

He is receiving bipartisan acclaim from some of the best experts in the business, such as Arthur Levitt. And the President knows that Harvey Pitt is doing an excellent job, a superb job. And the President looks forward to him continuing in that good job.

And now folks, for the laugh of the day:

SEC Lawyer Who Probed Bush Denies He Was Pressured

Reuters
BY ADAM ENTOUS
July 16, 2002

WASHINGTON - The Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer who investigated President Bush for insider trading more than a decade ago said on Tuesday that no pressure was put on him to drop the investigation even though Bush's father was president at the time.

Bruce Hiler -- who currently represents Jeffrey Skilling, bankrupt Enron Corp.'s former chief executive -- was associate director of the SEC's enforcement division when it investigated Bush's sale in 1990 of Harken Energy Corp. stock before the company reported large losses. At the time, Bush was an outside director of the Texas-based oil company.

In the run-up to the November congressional elections, Democrats have seized on the Harken transaction in assailing Bush's record as a businessman, and have questioned whether the SEC cut short the insider-trading investigation because Bush was the president's son.

Hiler, who left the SEC to join the law firm of O'Melveny & Myers in 1994, rejected suggestions the probe was in any way influenced by then President George Bush, telling Reuters: "There was no political pressure. There was no case, period."

"Of course we were aware we were dealing with the president's son. But it wasn't intimidating at all. I reported directly to the director of enforcement, who was a public official and a public servant. We cut our teeth in dealing with high profile individuals and organizations," he added.

But Hiler said he has not been contacted by Bush aides, who so far have been unsuccessful in deflecting attention from the president's business dealings at Harken.

Documents released last week showed that Bush had also received low-interest loans from Harken in 1986 and 1988, benefiting from boardroom deals he now wants banned as part of a crackdown on corporate misconduct.

Democrats said both transactions cast doubt on Bush's credibility in addressing a wave of accounting scandals at Enron, WorldCom Inc. and other major U.S. corporations that have sent the stock market tumbling to five-year lows.

WHITE HOUSE DIGS IN

The White House said Bush did nothing wrong and that the SEC settled the matter when Hiler sent an Oct. 1993 letter to Bush's attorney saying "the investigation has been terminated as to the conduct of Mr. Bush, and that, at this time, no enforcement action is contemplated with respect to him."

Still, the White House has rejected requests by news organizations and Democrats in Congress for the release of the SEC's complete files on Bush's financial dealings at Harken.

"The SEC has already looked into this in its entirety," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters on Tuesday. "You know the conclusions, you know the reasons, and you have everything you need."

At issue is Bush's sale of 212,140 shares of Harken common stock at $4 per share, or $848,560, on June 22, 1990. Two months later, the company announced bigger-than-expected losses for the quarter ending June 30, and its stock price plunged.

The SEC was alerted to the transaction in March 1991 when Bush disclosed the completed sale to the SEC 34 weeks late. It opened an investigation on April 5 of that same year.

Bush has asserted for years that he did not know the extent of Harken's losses when he sold the stock.

In a March 1992 memorandum prepared by Hiler and other investigators, the SEC backed up this assertion, saying the "evidence establishes that Bush was not aware of the majority of the items that comprised the loss Harken announced."

"Based upon our investigation, it appears that Bush did not engage in illegal insider trading because it does not appear that he possessed material nonpublic information," the memo concluded.

However, an internal Harken chronology, obtained by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, said that just over two weeks before Bush sold the stock, he was sent the company's "weekly flash report" giving "information provided by subsidiaries regarding estimated historical and projected earnings."

In a telephone interview, Hiler said the SEC's enforcement division conducted a thorough investigation, and that the president and his staff never weighed in.

"I absolutely feel we did a good job looking at this," Hiler added. "There was no case that I would have felt comfortable bringing. There was no indication of wrongdoing."

Hiler's current client, Skilling, is under investigation for his role in Enron's financial meltdown, and sources close to the case have said a federal indictment may be in the works. Enron, whose collapse last year wiped out thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in equity, was one of Bush's biggest campaign contributors.

"It must in no way be construed as indicating that the party[George W. Bush] has been exonerated or that no action may ultimately result from the staff's investigation."
Bruce A. Hiler - associate director of the SEC's enforcement division.

Mystery of Share Buyer Who Bailed Out Bush

Who is "Lee"?

Lee M. Bass

George Bush the Son Finds That Oil and Blood Do Mix
"Bush maintained that he had filed the missing disclosure form. But the commission investigated the transaction anyway. Bush’s lawyer, Robert W. Jordan, defended him by arguing that he had not known about the impending loss when he sold his stock and that he had thought he was selling into the anticipated good news that the Basses were underwriting the Bahrain project."

SIMPLY A GOOD POSSIBILITY IMHO.

Well, Did He or Didn't He?

Source

James Doty, SEC general counsel during the 1991 SEC investigation into Bush's Harken stock deals, denied today that Bush had been warned in writing by the SEC not to claim he had been exonerated. It proved to be a short-lived denial.

In an interview this morning on NPR, Doty at first denied that the SEC's letter to Bush forbid him in writing to claim that by closing the investigation he had been exonerated.

The NPR announcer was prepared with a copy of the letter. He read the 1991 SEC letter to Doty, including the line he denied was in it.

Doty quickly explained that such statements are common language in all such letters. Unfortunately Doty's explanation may now cause Bush new problems.

"That statement is put in the letters to warn people that the SEC can reopen the investigation at any time if new information surfaces," Doty tried to explain. "and to let them know that that they are forbidden from using the letter to claim they had been exonerated."

If Doty's characterization is correct, it would appear that President Bush's contention that he was cleared of any wrongdoing violates SEC rules.

Another contradiction between Bush's explanation of events surfaced today. Bush has maintained that he fully cooperated with the 1991 SEC investigation. That contention has now been contradicted by a memo from the very SEC officials who conducted - or tried to conduct - that investigation.

Three months into the 1991 investigation, SEC rank and file investigators complained to their politically appointed bosses that Bush had provided little more than already public information to the SEC about his sale. The allegation was contained in a 1991 SEC memo released yesterday by the Center for Public Integrity.

The 1991 investigation was closed without taking action. James A. Doty was the SEC's general counsel at the time. Doty had served as Bush's private attorney when he acquired the Texas Rangers.

Doty now says that he took no part in the probe and that SEC investigators took no action because there was "no substantial change in Harken's stock price" after Bush's sale that would indicate he was dumping the stock on inside information.

But Harken's historical stock chart says otherwise. A month after he sold his stock on June 22, 1989, Harken reported large losses and, from the end of August 1989 through the rest of 1990, the stock lost 70 percent of its value.

"Who Is David Edwards?" - The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Edwards also played an important role in securing an offshore drilling contract in Bahrain for Harken Energy Corp., on whose board sat George W. Bush, presidential son and current governor of Texas.

If only as a matter of curiosity, David Edwards is a Friend of Bill worth a few moments of attention. The tales of the university donations and the Harken deal are particularly interesting.

...Mr. Edwards quickly turned to his Saudi contacts, including Mr. Bakhsh. Two executives associated with the investment firm say Mr. Edwards brought the low-profile Saudi to Stephens in 1987.

Reports in this newspaper and the BCCI book "False Profits," by Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, say Mr. Bakhsh was a co-investor in Saudi Arabia with alleged BCCI front man Ghaith Pharaon. Khalid bin Mahfouz, another BCCI figure and head of the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, was Mr. Bakhsh's banker. University of Arkansas officials say Mr. Edwards sought to involve Mr. Bakhsh in a project to create a Middle East studies center at the school. In a letter to a university official, Mr. Edwards said he would bring the reclusive Saudi to Fayetteville to talk "about designing a simple mosque somewhere on campus."

...A few years earlier, Mr. Edwards provided important help to a company linked by family ties to then Vice President George Bush. In 198, Mr. Edwards and Mr. Bakhsh rode to the rescue of Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company that included George W. Bush on its board. Harken's web of Middle East connections was detailed in a 1991 Wall Street Journal report. Stephens officials, including Mr. Edwards, came up with an unusual arrangement to help cash-poor Harken: Union Bank of Switzerland would give the oil company a $25 million cash infusion in exchange for stock. UBS, the Journal noted, was not known as an investor in small U.S. companies and was a joint-venture partner with BCCI in a Geneva-based bank.

When UBS began to hit regulatory snags, it decided to unload its Harken stock. Stephens brought in a new buyer: Mr. Bakhsh. The Saudi tycoon ended up with a l7% stake in Harken, and his American representative, Chicago businessman Talat Othman, wound up with a seat on Harken's board. By August 1990, Mr. Othman was attending White House meetings with President Bush to discuss Middle East policy. Mr. Meyer, who serves as attorney for Mr. Othman as well as Mr. Bakhsh, says the Chicago businessman was invited to the meetings only because of his "longstanding involvement in Arab-American affairs. "

In April 1989, the government of Bahrain was looking for an oil company to explore its offshore holdings. According to a 1990 article in Forbes, the Bahrainis turned to Houston oil consultant Michael Ameen, a former head of governmental relations for Aramco. Mr. Ameen, the Journal noted in it's 1991 report is another "BCCI notation in the Harken story." As a top Aramco official, Mr. Ameen "had close-up dealings for years with the Saudi royal family and it's advisors," including Kamal Adliam, a BCCI principal and former head of Saudi intelligence. Mr. Ameen also reportedly is close to Mr. Bakhsh.

Mr. Ameen and Harken officials did not respond to interview requests. But according to Forbes the Bahrainis called Mr. Ameen, looking for a small company that would give them full attention. Mr. Ameen said he didn't know of any. By coincidence, Mr. Ameen's friend David Edwards called 10 minutes later on an unrelated matter. Mr. Ameen mentioned his problem. Mr. Edwards mentioned Harken.

Mr. Ameen negotiated the Bahrain deal, earning a $100,000 consulting fee. George W. Bush says he opposed it. "I thought it was a bad idea, " Gov. Bush said recently, because of Harken's lack of expertise in overseas and offshore drilling. Gov. Bush added that he "had no idea that BCCI figured into" Harken's financial dealings.

In June 1990, Mr. Bush sold some 60% of his Harken stake for about $850,000, earning a handsome profit. In November 1993, he resigned from Harken's board. Four months later, his successor was named: Michael Ameen. Harken has yet to discover any oil off Bahrain.

Mr. Bakhsh appears to have been pleased with Stephens's investment strategies. From February 1989 through October 1990, he purchased more than one million shares in the Stephen's controlled Worthen Bank paying more than $10 million for 9.6% of the stock, according to Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure statements. Mr. Bakhsh's attorney says he no longer is a Worthen shareholder.

Mr. Bakhsh has a wide range of U.S. investments, concentrated mainly in apparel, energy, real estate and financial services. In November, the Chicago Tribune reported that Mr. Bakhsh's First Commercial Financial Group, a commodities brokerage firm, was forced to shed its customer accounts after regulators raised concerns about capital shortfalls and customer complaints. Mr. Bakhsh owns First Commercial through Dearborn Financial Inc., an investment company run by Mr. Othman. Their attorney, Mr. Meyer, says that First Commercial was completing "the final phase of its long-term strategic restructuring plan" by transferring its customer accounts to other firms. Mr. Meyer says that Mr. Edwards was not involved in Dearborn and First Commercial.
[End of partial Transcript]

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