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They don't stop do they? |
Posted on 07/02/2002 8:20:19 PM PDT by Pokey78
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:44 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
An internal Securities and Exchange Commission memo from 1991 says President Bush repeatedly failed to file timely reports of his business interests and transactions before his election as Texas governor.
The memo said that when Bush was a director of a Texas-based oil and gas exploration firm called Harken Energy Corp., he had filed reports up to eight months late for four stock transactions totaling $1 million.
Bush brushed off a question about the transactions yesterday. "Everything I do is fully disclosed, it's been fully vetted. Any other question?" he said as he toured a church in Milwaukee.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
So there...
This isn't even a one news cycle story. It's a one minute story.
This is all they have.
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They don't stop do they? |
See this dot?--------> .
Divide that by 1000.
DUBYA - From Oil to Baseball to the Governor's Mansion Wall Street JournalMr. Bush's career with the Rangers baseball team, for example, is likely to come under intense scrutiny in the next 12 months. In 1989, when Mr. Bush brought together his investment group to buy the Rangers, the seller was Eddie Chiles, a longtime friend and supporter of President Bush. Mr. Chiles let the president's son and his group go to the head of the line. But in a pattern repeated through his business career, Mr. Bush's play did not quite make the grade. Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth stepped in, brokering a deal that brought Fort Worth financier Richard Rainwater together with the Bush group. Mr. Ueberroth's pitch to Mr. Rainwater was that he join the deal partly "out of respect" for President Bush, a source close to the negotiations told the New York Times.
Mr. Bush ponied up $500,000 as his personal grubstake in the $86 million purchase. He later invested another $106,000, bringing his share to 1.8% of the team. For his organizing efforts, his new partners rewarded him with an additional 10% interest. They also named him a managing general partner, a move that assured Mr. Bush a series of benign cameos in the limelight as he ramped up a run for Texas governor. Mr. Bush kept a low profile as his new baseball partners aggressively and successfully lobbied for a special referendum in which the voters of Arlington, Texas, approved a sales-tax increase to cover the $135 million cost of a new stadium. Texas conservatives denounced the measure as "corporate welfare."
Mr. Bush borrowed the $500,000 for his stake in the Rangers from United Bank of Midland, Texas, where he had served as a director from 1984 to 1986. Karen Hughes, a spokeswoman for Gov. Bush, declined to detail the terms of the loan. But she said it was a "fully collateralized, traditional loan, and fully paid off."
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.
Prior to joining Harken, Mr. Bush's business record was not good. He started his first firm, Arbusto Energy, in 1977, the headiest days of the oil patch, and was buffeted along with all the others by the high interest rates and collapsing oil prices of the next few years. Hoping to boost its fortunes, he changed Arbusto's name to Bush Exploration, then merged it with Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. in an effort to stay afloat. As the hard times continued, Spectrum merged with Harken Energy.
Harken viewed Mr. Bush's famous name as an important asset, oil industry executives close to the deal have said. Harken officials will not comment about Mr. Bush, but records show that the company's stock began to climb right after the Spectrum merger was announced, hitting $6 a share within a year before falling back. Mr. Bush was philosophical about losing his management role in the oil business but retaining profit. "I try to talk up Harken whenever I can," he told Forbes magazine in June 1987, "and I'd feel a lot worse if the stock hadn't tripled."
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.
Critics of Mr. Bush cried foul, charging that as a Harken director he was in a position to trade illegally on insider information before the stock's decline. Mr. Bush ultimately was cleared by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But suspicions of Mr. Bush's lucky timing had heightened at first, when the SEC, discovering that he had not filed the proper disclosure form, opened an investigation into the president's son. Mr. Bush claimed that he did file the correct form, but that it had been lost. He also said that he had cleared the stock sale with Harken's general counsel.
"At the time of the sale," explained Ms. Hughes, the Bush spokeswoman, "he did not know about the losses that would later be posted." Mr. Bush was not selling ahead of bad news, Ms. Hughes said, but into the good news that the Bass brothers, Texas billionaires with deep pockets and overseas drilling experience, were inking a joint-exploration pact with Harken in Bahrain. In October 1993, the SEC sent Mr. Bush's attorney a letter stating that "the investigation has been terminated into the conduct of Mr. Bush, and that, at this time, no enforcement action is contemplated with respect to him."
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