Posted on 07/07/2002 8:56:26 AM PDT by Brian Mosely
Sunday July 7, 10:21 am Eastern Time
NEW YORK, July 7 /PRNewswire/ -- Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and a handful of senior economic advisors sat down last week with President George W. Bush to work on the details of the his upcoming speech to corporate America. O'Neill urged Bush to make greedy CEOs pay for their crimes. "A kid caught with half a pound of marijuana gets more jail time than a corporate executive," O'Neill fumed. "That's not square." Bush emphatically agreed. "You're absolutely right," he said, Newsweek reports in the July 15 issue (on newsstands Monday, July 8).
While White House aides are tight-lipped about the contents of Bush's speech, GOP sources say that the president will likely support criminal charges for corporate officials who engage in dodgy accounting or file misleading or late papers to the government, and make CEOs and members of corporate boards more accountable for their companies' actions, report Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff and White House Correspondent Martha Brant. The speech will be the president's first extensive remarks on the business scandals that have devastated investor confidence.
White House strategists deny that Bush is vulnerable on what they call the "corporate-responsibility issue," because of his crowd's close ties to a fudge-the-numbers corporate culture. But the speech has all the earmarks of a full-scale offensive, with outgoing counselor Karen Hughes supervising the project even as she packed for Texas, Newsweek reports. The White House was especially irritated last week as old allegations circulated about the president's tenure on the board of directors of Harken Energy Co. Bush was investigated in the early '90s by the Securities and Exchange Commission after selling $850,000 in stock shortly before the company announced a $23 million loss. The SEC declined to bring charges against Bush. But SEC documents also show that during Bush's tenure, the company came under scrutiny for another questionable deal.
In 1989, Harken sold 80 percent of a subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum, to a partnership of Harken insiders for $12 million. The company claimed an $8 million profit on the deal, and used the profit to offset company losses. But in fact, the company itself financed the deal, lending the money for the transaction to the partnership, an arrangement critics are now likening to Enron's off-the-book deals. When the SEC aggressively questioned the deal, the company agreed to restate its earnings and wipe the $8 million profit off its books. White House press Secretary Ari Fleischer downplayed the transaction last week as a dispute over "accounting procedures," and said it bore no resemblance to Enron's corporate malfeasance. Yet Bush's seat on the Harken board puts him in an awkward position to now demand accountability of others.
...likely Call for Criminal Charges for Presidents, Senators and Representatives of Congress Who Engage in Dodgy Accounting Practices, or File Misleading, Late Papers to taxpayers.
The flat out accounting fraud and lies our elected representatives engage in is as bad as, and more fiscally harmful, than anything these corporate crooks have done.
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