When Controversy Follows Cash

Washington Post ^ | September 3, 2007 | Solomon and Mosk

[Timeout]

Sant S. Chatwal, an Indian American businessman, has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaigns, even as he battled governments on two continents to escape bankruptcy and millions of dollars in tax liens....

Chatwal's case reached from his native India to New York City. The IRS pursued him for approximately $4 million...

New York state placed a lien seeking more than $5 million in taxes. He forfeited a building to New York City on which he was delinquent on property taxes and was sued by federal regulators seeking to recoup millions of dollars in loans from a failed bank where he served as a director. Across the ocean, three Indian banks forced him into U.S. bankruptcy, and he was charged with bank fraud. .....

In 1997, the FDIC sued Chatwal over his role as a director and a guarantor of unpaid loans at the failed First New York Bank for Business...his loans had "resulted in losses to the bank in excess of $12 million,"...regulators also questioned why Chatwal continued to rent a spacious penthouse apartment in New York in the midst of his financial turmoil. "The debtor has managed to continue living in luxurious style in the same penthouse apartment he resided in at a time he claimed a net worth of tens of millions of dollars without adequate explanation of how his family's limited income is able to support such a lifestyle," the government said in a 1997 filing. In September 2000, Chatwal hosted a half-million dollar fundraiser at that Upper East Side penthouse for Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign. A few months later the FDIC abruptly settled the case, agreeing on Dec. 18, 2000, to let Chatwal pay $125,000 for the loans that it had said caused at least $12 million in losses....

[Timeout]

Funny how all these "foreign businessmen" keep coming up with all that cash while supposedly losing their shirts. One would almost think someone was funneling cash through them....nah!

And the coincidences are remarkable: he's in trouble with the FDIC, hosts a fundraiser for the then-president's wife, and - voila! - the FDIC (just as said president is leaving office) settles a $12 million case for only $125k. Amazing.

Lastly, these reporters never tell us anything about how these "businessmen" came to America. Chatwal appears to be a citizen (referred to as an "Indian American"). But, like Hsu, it would be interesting to know more about the process they went through to get here.

[ml/nj]

The founder of the Bombay Palace restaurant chain, Chatwal is one of a growing number of fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign whose backgrounds have prompted questions about how much screening the candidates devote to their "bundlers" while they press to raise record amounts.

All of a sudden we are hearing about "bundlers." (I had never heard this term used before a week or two ago.) Do the Republicans have "bundlers" too, or only the Democrats? Maybe the Commodities Scam Queen could provide a list of her "bundlers" to the doting press? Or maybe one of her staff members who must be monitoring FR could post her list of "bundlers" right here on FR?

ML/NJ

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl

[EdReform]

ping