Specfically, Bush did appear to have insider information. One can argue whether it was negative or positive. But it appears that the stock dropped due to the Iraq invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, rather than the subsequent 10Q issuance that may have happened on Monday, August 13, 1990 as a guess, which didn't seem to impact the price much. Harken had a deal with Bahrain which made it sensitive to Gulf happenings. The Gulf War does muddy the waters here.
This is quite an interesting detective story, actually. I am sure we will hear more about it - much more.
cc: to the Bushbot lady. :)
The memo said Bush sold 212,140 shares of Harken stock on June 22, 1990, for $848,560, before Harken's announcement on Aug. 20, 1990, that it had lost $23.2 million in the quarter ending June 30. The SEC said the announcement caused Harken's stock to drop by more than 20 percent, and called Bush's stock sale a "matter under inquiry."
At the time, Bush was a member of Harken's audit committee. The stock sale was reported by Bush on March 4, 1991, about 34 weeks late, the memo said. Dan Bartlett, Bush's communications director, said that was the result of a miscommunication between Bush's lawyer and the Harken counsel's office.
"These types of late filings are not out of the ordinary," Bartlett said. "It would be like doing a 60 [mph] in a 55."
The White House provided the first four pages of an SEC memo from 1992 which said, "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." Bartlett said the information about the losses at issue was available only to Harken's executive committee, of which Bush was not a member.
Now from the Flocco article you linked.....
I don't know where Flocco is getting his info, but the following differs greatly.....
Wall Street JournalThat's hardly a [$848,560 -- some 250 percent profit on the stock's original value "] .... So I have my doubts of Flocco as he's been anti Bush if I remember correctly. I'll trust the Wall Street Journal to come closer to the facts here that Flocco. JMO.In fact, the loan was paid off through the sale of stock Mr. Bush had been awarded in his only successful venture in the oil business, as a director of Texas-based Harken Energy Corp. Barely afloat in the tough oil market in the early 1980s, Mr. Bush joined Harken as a director in 1986. He was given 212,000 shares of Harken stock, worth about $500,000, or $2.50 a share, at the end of the year--although he had no daily management responsibilities. He later acquired an additional 133,000 shares through special offerings to company directors, and he was paid between $42,000 and $120,000 a year for the next five years as a consultant. .....
In 1989, Harken's stock was trading at between $4 and $5 a share. That's when Mr. Bush put up his shares as collateral for the Rangers loan. In January 1990, with shares trading around $4.50, Harken announced that it had signed a potentially lucrative oil-exploration deal with the government of Bahrain. On June 20, 1990, Mr. Bush sold the bulk of his Harken stock for $848,000, at $4 a share, and paid off the Rangers loan. Eight days later, Harken finished the second quarter with losses of $23 million, and the stock went into a nosedive, losing nearly 75% of its value, finishing the year at a little over $1 a share.