Just got back in. Don't mind the surface scratchers. They come and go. They know nothing, therefore they are harmless. Name calling is all they have. We'll eventually, God willing, get a
real conservative in the White House. One who
truly believes in the Constitution. You
really must be 13 years old to understand this however. This thread has rolled over. Folks should be aware of the Bush family business traditions. This gives just a small sample snapshot of their activities in the past.
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" - Baker Botts, L.L.P.
- 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, L.L.P., 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." - Baker Botts, L.L.P.
"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 at Baker Botts, L.L.P..
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
Chief Says He Opposes Release of Files on Bush
"Q Mr. President, even while you're calling for transparency in corporate America, you refuse to ask the SEC to turn over documents from its investigation into Harken Energy Corporation, your old company. ..Why not just clear the air, ask the SEC to release those documents..?
"PRESIDENT BUSH: Secondly, as to a look at Harken, the SEC, as a result of Freedom of Information requests, has released documents, and the key document said there is no case. It was fully investigated by career investigators."
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. Also, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigators, heading an insider trading probe in 1991, said they had difficulty getting useful information from Mr George W. Bush on what he knew about the finances of Harken Energy Corp, where he was a director. This, according to an SEC memo dated July 17, 1991.
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 Signed Stock 'Lockup' Letter
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
"There is substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits in the weeks before he sold the $848,560 of Harken stock."
US News and World Report - by Stephen J. Hedges March 16, 1992 - The Color of Money.
Q "Mr. President, you've said that you didn't know, when you sold your Harken stock, that the company was going to restate its earnings. As a member of its audit committee, how could you not know that its earnings had not been properly accounted for?
THE PRESIDENT: Because that fact, that fact came up "after" I sold the stock."
Source
"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.
"Responsible leaders do not take home tens of millions of dollars in compensation as their companies prepared to file for bankruptcy, devastating the holdings of their investors."
George W. Bush - speech on "corporate accountability" July 9, 2002.
THE ROAD TO PERDITION - By FRANK RICH Partial Excerpt:
"Nor, of course, do we know the full details of the president's past history at Harken Energy or the vice president's at Halliburton. Those details matter not so much because of any criminality they might reveal — we are rapidly learning that there is no such thing as a prosecutable corporate crime anyway — but because of what they may add to our knowledge of the ethics, policies and personnel of a secretive administration to which we've entrusted both our domestic and economic security. What we know about Harken so far is largely due to the S.E.C. documents unearthed and posted since 2000 by the enterprising and nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, also a leader in uncovering the Clinton administration's Lincoln Bedroom scandals. "It's Forrest Gump does finance," says Charles Lewis, the center's founder, in looking at the story line of the remarkable George W. Bush business career. "Every time he seemed to be in trouble, he would end up with a box of chocolates."
The president's self-contradictory defense of his past is to say he was "fully vetted" by the S.E.C. even though he still hasn't "figured it out completely" himself. But the S.E.C. never interviewed Mr. Bush during its investigation. The agency was then run by an appointee of his father, Richard Breeden, who recused himself from the case. Last Sunday, Mr. Breeden turned up on Fox News as a George W. defender. Yet when Tony Snow asked him twice if he could give the president "a clean bill of health, yes or no," Mr. Breeden pleaded ignorance and ducked. Perhaps that's why the White House has not asked the S.E.C. to release its Harken papers, even though Harvey Pitt last weekend said he would if it did. The president has also told the press that "you need to look back on the director's minutes" to answer questions about Harken — and then refused to provide those minutes or to instruct Harken to release them either. But yesterday Mr. Lewis's organization posted a pile of them at www.publicintegrity.org, and says that more documents are yet to come.
What is the president hiding? Clearly the story here is not merely a hard-to-prove case of insider trading, tardy stock-sale forms and Mr. Bush's knowledge of the sham transaction involving Aloha Petroleum. Most likely it also involves the mystery first raised by The Wall Street Journal and Time in 1991. Back then, their investigative journalists tried to break the cronyism code by which tiny Harken, which had never drilled a well overseas, miraculously beat out the giant Amoco for a prized contract for drilling in Bahrain. They also tried to learn what various Saudi money men, some tied to the terrorist-sponsoring Bank of Credit and Commerce International, may have had to do with Harken while the then-president's son was in proximity.
These questions, like the companion questions about Halliburton's dealings with Iraq on Mr. Cheney's watch, are not ancient history but will gain in relevance in direct proportion to the expansion of the war on terrorism and the decline of the Dow. Sooner or later George W. Bush will have to answer them, because even though he cares more about loving his neighbors than the bottom line, the rest of us are just irredeemably crass."
Bush and the Billionaire Soros: How Insider Capitalism Benefited W.
Report Says That Harken Sought Influence In Buying Bush Firm
THE BOSTON GLOBE
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff
July 19, 2002
Source
WASHINGTON - Billionaire investor George Soros was quoted yesterday as saying that Harken Energy Corp. purchased a Texas oil company run by George W. Bush in 1986 because ''we were buying political influence.'' Soros owned nearly a third of Harken at the time the deal was made.
Soros, who runs a variety of investment funds and philanthropic organizations, was offering a reason why Harken purchased Spectrum 7, a failing oil company that was then run by Bush.
In an article posted on the Web site of The Nation magazine, David Corn, the magazine's Washington editor, said he happened to run into Soros at a party recently and asked Soros why Harken bought Bush's company.
''I didn't know him,'' Corn quoted Soros as saying. ''He was supposed to bring in the Gulf connection. But it didn't come to anything. We were buying political influence. That was it. He was not much of a businessman.''
Soros, a political liberal who often has been critical of President Bush's policies, has declined repeated requests for an interview about his dealings with Harken. A Soros spokesman, Michael Vachon, yesterday would neither deny nor confirm that Soros made the comment. But Vachon said it was ''taken out of context'' because it implied that Soros was actively involved in Harken's decision to buy Spectrum 7.
''The quote is out of context, because it makes it appear as if Soros were involved in the deal,'' Vachon said. ''That is not the case. Soros did not know Bush, and he was not actively involved in the management of the company.''
Vachon, who said he had discussed the issue with Soros, did not dispute that Soros uttered the comment. ''I don't want to say the quote is inaccurate,'' Vachon said. ''This is two months ago at a cocktail party with hundreds of people in the room.''
At the same time, Vachon did provide the fullest explanation yet of Soros's involvement with Harken. Vachon said Soros owned a small company, Soros Oil, that was bought by Harken in 1985. As a result, Soros received stock that made him a major Harken shareholder. But he left management of Harken to others, Vachon said.
Then, about a year after Soros acquired his stake, Harken was looking for more acquisitions and targeted the Bush company, Spectrum 7. Numerous Harken officials have said over the years that Bush's presence at Spectrum 7 made the failing company more attractive than it would otherwise have been.
Harken officials put Bush on the board, gave him stock options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and paid him a consulting fee of $120,000 a year. It was around the same time, October 1986, that Harvard Management Co., the independent investment arm of Harvard University, began pouring millions of dollars into Harken, eventually owning a third of the company.
Soros sold his Harken stock back to the company in 1989, a year before Harken struck a deal with the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain to drill for oil off its coast. That deal sparked questions about whether Bahrain offered it to Harken in an effort to court favor with Bush's father, who was then president of the United States. Bush, however, has said that he tried to dissuade the company from making the Bahrain deal because of concern that Harken was not prepared to follow through. It turned out that the Bahrain wells were dry.
Soros recently has been critical of Bush's stand on corporate responsibility. Soros told the Wall Street Journal recently that the Bush administration has shown ''no particular desire to do too much about'' corporate excesses.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
Bush and Harken
The Nation
By Jason Leopold
July 18, 2002
Last week, while Bush spoke to Wall Street about corporate malfeasance, he was beset by questions about the timing of his sale of stock twelve years ago while he served as a director of Harken Energy. Bush sold the Harken stock about two months before the company reported huge losses and shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait, leaving many asking whether the President had benefited from inside information. In addition, Bush was tardy in filing the appropriate sale-related forms with the SEC. Bush has said he filed the proper documents with the SEC on time--even though it arrived thirty-four weeks late--and suggested the agency must have lost the file. Last week, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said there had been a "mix-up" by the Bush lawyers who handled the paperwork.
While SEC reporting requirements may seem like a minor issue, it's crucial information for the average investor because it allows them to determine whether insiders have received undisclosed information about the company's financial condition. The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 requires company insiders to disclose publicly, in a report called a Form 4, all stock purchases and sales by the tenth day of the month following the transaction.
This week, as President Bush's own business acumen is being called into question, additional SEC documents show that Bush violated federal securities laws on three other occasions during his tenure at Harken by missing the deadline for filing documents about his stock transactions with the SEC.
Bush purchased stock in Harken three times between 1986 and 1989, and was several months late in reporting those transactions to the SEC, according to documents from the agency. One transaction, in which Bush purchased 25,000 shares of Harken stock on June 16, 1989, took place three days before Harken started selling its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, where the stock traded as high as $50. The stock had previously been sold in the over-the-counter market. Bush did not report the transaction to the SEC until September 7, 1989, more than four weeks after the deadline, according to SEC documents, and he reaped a windfall in profits by purchasing the additional shares before they were sold on the NYSE.
On November 1, 1986, Bush acquired 212,152 shares of Harken as a result of the merger of his failing oil company--Spectrum 7--with Harken, but did not report the transaction with the SEC until April 7, 1987, more than twelve weeks after the deadline. On December 10, 1986, Bush purchased another 80,000 shares in Harken and again missed the deadline for reporting the transaction by eight weeks, according to SEC documents. Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, was unable to answer why President Bush missed the deadline in reporting his stock transactions with the SEC on three other occasions, but said that the SEC obviously did not see the violation as an important matter either. "The SEC didn't do anything about it," Bartlett said. "It does not appear to be an important issue."
John Heine, a spokesman for the SEC, said the agency has never prosecuted anyone for missing the deadline to file insider-transaction forms with the agency. In fact, Heine said, insiders routinely miss the deadline. "It's something we're starting to crack down on," Heine said. Bush was investigated by the SEC for insider trading, but the probe ended in 1993 without any charges being filed against the President. Democrats, including former Texas Governor Ann Richards, have charged that the investigation was a whitewash because of Bush's political relationships.
Bruce Hiler, the associate director of the SEC's enforcement division, who wrote a letter to Bush's attorney saying the investigation was being terminated, now represents former Enron president Jeff Skilling in matters before the government. Richard Breeden, the SEC chairman at the time, was deputy counsel to Bush's father when he was Vice President and was appointed SEC chairman when H.W. Bush became President. James Doty, the SEC's general counsel at the time, helped W. Bush negotiate the contract to buy the Texas Rangers. Bush used the proceeds of his sale of Harken stock in 1990 to pay off a loan he took out for a minority stake in the baseball team. Doty has said that he recused himself from the SEC's two-year probe into Bush's sale of Harken stock.
For President Bush, this is the fourth time in a decade he has been forced to answer questions about his business experience. And he still refuses to be forthcoming. Members of Congress are calling for Harvey Pitt, chairman of the SEC, to release all files related to Bush's Harken Energy days, but Pitt said on Meet the Press that he considers Bush's Harken transactions a dead issue and therefore he will not publicly release the files.
This kind of secrecy by the Bush Administration should come as no surprise to the American public. Vice President Dick Cheney has refused to reveal the names of people his energy task force met with prior to drafting a national energy policy. Cheney has come under fire for praising Arthur Andersen, the auditing firm convicted of obstruction of justice for shredding Enron documents, in a promotional video years ago; Cheney's former company, Halliburton, where the Vice President was chairman, is under investigation by the SEC for accounting improprieties during Cheney's tenure. And there's still the thorny issue of Bush's archives from his days as governor of Texas, which are currently tucked away in his father's presidential library and difficult to access.
The Texas Legislature authorized its former governors to place their official records into a repository other than the state archives. The Texas State Library and Archives, however, houses the official papers of every Texas governor before Bush.
Bush secured a one-page agreement last December 19 to place records of his term in his father's presidential library. Soon after, Bush placed more than 1,800 boxes of documents into the George Bush Library at Texas A&M University. Within weeks of the records arriving at the Bush Library, the New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Associated Press and Public Citizen had all submitted open-records requests for information from the Bush papers. Most of the requests involved correspondence between Bush and Harken and Enron officials, and records concerning energy deregulation. The records have yet to be released.