Thursday, January 17, 2008 - 1:07 PM EST
National Century co-founder pleads not guilty to witness tamperingBusiness First of Columbus - by Kevin Kemper Business First
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NCFE president loses law team [Columbus]
National Century president indicted over attempted witness tampering [Columbus]
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The former president of National Century Financial Enterprises Inc. and one of his associates went back to court Thursday morning to face arraignment on a conspiracy and witness tampering indictment.
Lance K. Poulsen, a founder of Dublin-based NCFE, pleaded not guilty before U.S. District Court Judge Algenon L. Marbley in Columbus. The court appearance by Poulsen and his associate Karl A. Demmler, a former Dublin-area bar owner, was their second since being indicted on a witness tampering charge in October. Demmler also pleaded not guilty at Thursday's hearing.
A federal grand jury indicted Poulsen and Demmler in the fall on one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice. According to the indictment, Poulsen and Demmler hatched a scheme to give $500,000 to an ex-NCFE executive if she would have "amnesia" when testifying as a government witness about the firm's 2002 collapse.
On Jan. 15, the government issued a revised, or superseding indictment, that in addition to the conspiracy charge added a count each of witness tampering and witness tampering by influencing testimony.
Additionally, Poulsen is facing six counts of securities fraud, four counts of concealment of money laundering and a count each of conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy over National Century's collapse. The government alleges Poulsen led NCFE executives in embezzling as much as $3 billion.
Poulsen has been serving time in Franklin County Jail since autumn after the court revoked his pretrial release due to the witness tampering charges. However, Marbley issued an order Jan. 15 that will transfer Poulsen to the Ross County Jail in Chillicothe so he can adequately prepare for his criminal trial on the company's collapse, scheduled for August.
While Poulsen is scheduled to stand trial this summer, five other former NCFE executives are facing trial in February, and one is facing trial in October. The court scheduled all seven defendants to stand trial on February 4, but changed Poulsen's trial to August, and defendant James K. Happ's trial to October.
Poulsen's original attorneys quit in November after the government indicted him on witness tampering. Poulsen didn't hire new attorneys until December, and the court has granted his legal team time to catch up.
Meanwhile, the government didn't charge Happ, a former executive vice president at NCFE, with wrongdoing until last July while the other defendants were charged in May 2006. Happ and his team were also given additional time to prepare.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Recession , War Crimes, Health Care......
YOU, connect the dots.
Go to americanhealthcarefraud.blog to see more whree Rainwater REALLY got his money.
Betting on the coming storm: Sovereign Deed's bankroller sees disaster ahead
by: Ed Brayton
Sunday (12/09) at 23:01 PM
The article notes that Rainwater has been spending the bulk of his time researching peak oil theory and reading survivalist literature about the inevitability of economic collapse that will cause society to fracture:
And while Rainwater says he doesn't think that Kuntsler's worst-case scenario is likely to come true, he does believe that his dystopic prediction is closer to reality than most of us would like to believe and he's been buying copies of this book and handing them out in his circle of business associates. The key to all of this is the collapse of the oil market, which Rainwater considers inevitable, and the resulting societal strife:
PMC's such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, founded by Rainwater's partner in Sovereign Deed, Barrett Moore, have become notorious for trigger-happy behavior in Iraq. At home, the PMC entrepreneurs tout themselves as security for insecure America.
In pitching the Pellston project to state and local officials, the leaders of Sovereign Deed have outlined a business plan that clearly seeks to capitalize on this future dystopia. Retired Brig. Gen. Richard Mills, vice president of Sovereign Deed, told a town hall meeting that the company planned to offer disaster survival aid to the wealthy through a "country club style of membership." For an initial charge of $50,000 and a $15,000 annual fee, Sovereign Deed will come to the aid of their members in the event of a disaster, natural or societal.
They plan to use the Pellston airport as their base of operations, dispatching teams of armed men, mostly former members of the U.S. military's Special Forces, which Mills used to command, to protect the property of their members, to distribute survival rations and, if necessary, to evacuate them from a dangerous situation. At that town hall meeting, Mills was asked by a local resident about the ethics of providing such protections only for those wealthy enough to afford it when it is the government's responsibility to protect all Americans during such disasters.
"Every individual is responsible for preparing and supporting themselves," he said. The government cannot be everywhere all the time."
The person who asked the question, noting that this answer did not address his question about the ethics of selling heightened protection to the rich and leaving those who can't afford it to fend for themselves, tried to ask a follow-up question but was cut off by a local official who said it was not an appropriate forum for debate. That suggests this is not an issue that neither Sovereign Deed nor their local government advocates feels comfortable addressing. Rainwater, on the other hand, speaks in almost mystical terms about his ability to grasp the magnitude of the inevitable collapses that inevitably convinced him to finance this new company:
"This is going to get a little religious. I ask why I was blessed with this insightfulness. Everyone who has achieved something, scientists, ballplayers, thinks they were given their talent for a reason. Why me? Was I given this insightfulness at this particular time? Or was I just given this insightfulness?" He pauses. "I just want people to look out. 'Cause it could be bad."
Now, it seems, Rainwater doesn't just want them to watch out; he also wants them to pay him to bring the biggest umbrella to combat the coming storm.
Requests for an interview with Richard Rainwater for this story were unanswered.
Go to americanhealthcarefraud.blog to see more whree Rainwater REALLY got his money.
Betting on the coming storm: Sovereign Deed's bankroller sees disaster ahead
by: Ed Brayton
Sunday (12/09) at 23:01 PM
The article notes that Rainwater has been spending the bulk of his time researching peak oil theory and reading survivalist literature about the inevitability of economic collapse that will cause society to fracture:
And while Rainwater says he doesn't think that Kuntsler's worst-case scenario is likely to come true, he does believe that his dystopic prediction is closer to reality than most of us would like to believe and he's been buying copies of this book and handing them out in his circle of business associates. The key to all of this is the collapse of the oil market, which Rainwater considers inevitable, and the resulting societal strife:
PMC's such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, founded by Rainwater's partner in Sovereign Deed, Barrett Moore, have become notorious for trigger-happy behavior in Iraq. At home, the PMC entrepreneurs tout themselves as security for insecure America.
In pitching the Pellston project to state and local officials, the leaders of Sovereign Deed have outlined a business plan that clearly seeks to capitalize on this future dystopia. Retired Brig. Gen. Richard Mills, vice president of Sovereign Deed, told a town hall meeting that the company planned to offer disaster survival aid to the wealthy through a "country club style of membership." For an initial charge of $50,000 and a $15,000 annual fee, Sovereign Deed will come to the aid of their members in the event of a disaster, natural or societal.
They plan to use the Pellston airport as their base of operations, dispatching teams of armed men, mostly former members of the U.S. military's Special Forces, which Mills used to command, to protect the property of their members, to distribute survival rations and, if necessary, to evacuate them from a dangerous situation. At that town hall meeting, Mills was asked by a local resident about the ethics of providing such protections only for those wealthy enough to afford it when it is the government's responsibility to protect all Americans during such disasters.
"Every individual is responsible for preparing and supporting themselves," he said. The government cannot be everywhere all the time."
The person who asked the question, noting that this answer did not address his question about the ethics of selling heightened protection to the rich and leaving those who can't afford it to fend for themselves, tried to ask a follow-up question but was cut off by a local official who said it was not an appropriate forum for debate. That suggests this is not an issue that neither Sovereign Deed nor their local government advocates feels comfortable addressing. Rainwater, on the other hand, speaks in almost mystical terms about his ability to grasp the magnitude of the inevitable collapses that inevitably convinced him to finance this new company:
"This is going to get a little religious. I ask why I was blessed with this insightfulness. Everyone who has achieved something, scientists, ballplayers, thinks they were given their talent for a reason. Why me? Was I given this insightfulness at this particular time? Or was I just given this insightfulness?" He pauses. "I just want people to look out. 'Cause it could be bad."
Now, it seems, Rainwater doesn't just want them to watch out; he also wants them to pay him to bring the biggest umbrella to combat the coming storm.
Requests for an interview with Richard Rainwater for this story were unanswered.
Texas billionaire , of course Bush's Partner (In criime)
Why should this matter?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Betting on the coming storm: Sovereign Deed's bankroller sees disaster ahead
by: Ed Brayton
Sunday (12/09) at 23:01 PM
Texas billionaire Richard Rainwater made his fortune by figuring out ways to profit from the misfortune of others. When the oil bust hit Houston in the mid '90s and property values bottomed out, he swooped in to buy up millions of square feet of office space at pennies on the dollar, investments that made him his first billion dollars when the values inevitably rebounded. As the money man behind private military contractor Sovereign Deed, which is now in the process of building a base of operations in Pellston, Mich., it looks like Rainwater is preparing to profit again by moving from Fortune to Soldier of Fortune.
Rainwater, whose net worth of $3.5 billion makes him one of the 100 richest Americans, began his financial ascent when he was put in charge of the family investments for Sid Bass, his classmate at Stanford. Rainwater turned their already sizable nest egg into a fortune worth more than $5 billion before striking out on his own in the mid-1980s.Sovereign Deed is the latest of many companies he has co-founded or founded , including oil-drilling company ENSCO International, Columbia Hospital Corporation and Crescent Real Estate.
Why the move into the private military contractor (PMC) field? The answer may be in a 2005 profile of Rainwater in Fortune magazine, where he spoke in blunt terms about what he sees as an imminent economic and societal collapse.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Betting on the coming storm: Sovereign Deed's bankroller sees disaster ahead
by: Ed Brayton
Sunday (12/09) at 23:01 PM
Texas billionaire Richard Rainwater made his fortune by figuring out ways to profit from the misfortune of others. When the oil bust hit Houston in the mid '90s and property values bottomed out, he swooped in to buy up millions of square feet of office space at pennies on the dollar, investments that made him his first billion dollars when the values inevitably rebounded. As the money man behind private military contractor Sovereign Deed, which is now in the process of building a base of operations in Pellston, Mich., it looks like Rainwater is preparing to profit again by moving from Fortune to Soldier of Fortune.
Rainwater, whose net worth of $3.5 billion makes him one of the 100 richest Americans, began his financial ascent when he was put in charge of the family investments for Sid Bass, his classmate at Stanford. Rainwater turned their already sizable nest egg into a fortune worth more than $5 billion before striking out on his own in the mid-1980s.Sovereign Deed is the latest of many companies he has co-founded or founded , including oil-drilling company ENSCO International, Columbia Hospital Corporation and Crescent Real Estate.
Why the move into the private military contractor (PMC) field? The answer may be in a 2005 profile of Rainwater in Fortune magazine, where he spoke in blunt terms about what he sees as an imminent economic and societal collapse.
Sovereign Deed , Richard Rainwater....BUSH!!! Oh yea!
Romney, Clinton take Michigan's presidential primary
Sovereign Deed CEO lied about military service, records show
by: Eartha Jane Melzer
Thursday (01/17) at 12:07 PM
Contractor made millions claiming Army stripes
In December 2003, the founders of Triple Canopy, a private security firm in Baghdad, caught their first big break, signing a contract with the Coalition Provisional Authority governing Iraq. Within four months, Triple Canopy had signed six contracts worth more than $28 million to guard U.S. facilities throughout Iraq.
For the military veterans who founded the company and Barrett H. Moore, who was then Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, these agreements launched the company on the path to what it is today: one of the leading private military contractors, sharing a $1 billion contract with Blackwater USA and DynCorp to guard U.S. personnel in the Middle East.
Moore, 43, a Chicago businessman, now presents himself as a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and business "visionary" who revolutionized the private security market but an Army spokesman said Moore was never an officer and never had intelligence training. Moore, fired by Triple Canopy in 2004, has launched a new private security firm called Sovereign Deed. He has parlayed his Triple Canopy success into political influence, persuading Republican and Democratic state officials to rewrite state law so that Sovereign Deed can receive $10 million in tax abatements and other incentives to establish a "national response center" for its private disaster relief business in northern Michigan.
Continued -
Eartha Jane Melzer :: Sovereign Deed CEO lied about military service, records show
In promoting Sovereign Deed, Moore has emphasized the military expertise of himself and the company's top officials. On the company's Web site, Moore states that he "served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, specializing in issues related to the non-proliferation of biological weapons and related weapons of mass destruction (WMD)."
What Moore's Pentagon patrons and political allies in Michigan have not known is the true story of Moore's military service. According to U.S. Army record keepers, Moore never completed his Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program in college and was discharged from an inactive branch of the Reserves in 1994 without ever having gone through basic training. Contrary to the claims on Sovereign Deed's Web site, Moore never served as an Army intelligence officer, or in any other branch of the country's armed forces.
Moore's brushes with law enforcement also escape detection. He was convicted of three counts of criminal fraud in Australia in 1992 and served time in prison, according to court records there. An appeals court later reversed Moore's conviction. But in a related criminal trial, Moore acknowledged participating in an "illegal enterprise" to smuggle cars from Chicago to Melbourne and admitted fabricating documents as part of the operation.
Moore did not return phone calls requesting comment.
Moore's story is another chapter in the remarkable emergence of private military contractors (PMCs) since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Caught shorthanded after the U.S. invasion in 2003, American authorities scrambled to find protection for U.S. facilities and personnel with few procedures for vetting the contractors' background or controlling their activities. As PMCs like Triple Canopy and Blackwater USA grew, their armed employees became embroiled in unprovoked shooting incidents and the killing of Iraqi civilians, and Congress and the State Department launched investigations that are still ongoing.
As the Barrett Moore story illustrates, the rise of the PMCs came at the expense of accountability. When Michigan Messenger reconstructed his career, the returning war zone entrepreneur who boasted to Michigan residents and politicians of an Army Intelligence career turns out to have more experience as a used car salesman.
Selling Military Expertise
According to interviews and public records, Barrett Holloway Moore, 43, is a creative businessman whose audacious style has won admirers and alienated former business partners.
In 1995, he made headlines in Chicago when he successfully proposed marriage to lawyer Mary Szews by hiring a helicopter to wave a banner outside the window of her office on the 73rd story of the Sears Tower. Last year, Moore registered more trademarks with government on behalf of Sovereign Deed than all but five U.S. corporations.
Moore has been sued for fraud three times since 2005, according to court records. One of the lawsuits has been settled, one went to arbitration with unknown results, and a third is still pending in Illinois state court.
Moore and his associates at Sovereign Deed have emphasized military experience as a key feature of the company. The firm's spokesman in northern Michigan is retired Brigadier General Richard Mills, a former deputy commanding general for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
In community meetings about Sovereign Deed's plans in November, Mills received hearty applause when he was introduced as a 30-year military veteran. He said he was proud to associate with veterans whom he called "the most magnificent of people."
In a phone interview Mills said that Moore was among the people who brought military experience to Sovereign Deed, adding he knew people who had served with him. He declined to provide any names.
But a spokesman for the National Personnel Records Service in St. Louis, which maintains records on all armed service personnel, said the NPRS has no record of Moore's service. Another search by the Army Human Resources Command in Alexandria, Va., determined that Moore never completed his college ROTC training at DePauw University in Indiana in 1985-86, had never gone into basic training or been on active duty or had intelligence responsibilities.
In response to questions from Michigan Messenger, a Sovereign Deed official stressed the accusation, if true, was quite serious.
"Stating that one has falsified military service goes to the very core of pride, honor, and integrity of those who have served," wrote Glenn Collins, the chief operating officer of Sovereign Deed, in an email.
Collins provided three documents that he said supported Moore's claims to have served in U.S. Army Intelligence.
The first document Sovereign Deed provided was a letter, dated Sept. 11, 1985, from Col. Nicholas Fritsch who served as the lieutenant commander of the 476th Military Intelligence Detachment in Indianapolis. As a member of ROTC, Moore served in the unit under Fritsch's command.
"Cadet Moore is one of the most impressive service members with whom I have served throughout my career," Fritsch wrote in recommending Moore for commission as a military intelligence officer." "…[He] has shown the personal traits and skills of a natural leader."
In a telephone interview with Michigan Messenger, Fritsch, now retired and living in Florida, recalled Moore as "a high school all-star type, … good looking, … smart, possibly athletic, a person of tremendous capability."
Fritsch said that Moore's claim of Army intelligence service was "making a mountain out of a mole hill."
"At the level of Moore's service he would have no first-line connection to high-ranking intelligence," Fritsch said. He added that he thought public boasting about intelligence work was inappropriate because it could compromise security.
The second document provided by Sovereign Deed was a May 1986 letter notifying Moore of his transfer to a U.S. Army Reserve unit until his expected graduation later in the year. The third document was an honorable discharge certificate dated April 21, 1994. Moore's rank at the time of discharge was blacked out on the copy of the document provided by Sovereign Deed.
The records confirm that Moore participated in the ROTC program as an undergraduate but provide no evidence of active duty intelligence work. Collins did not respond to a request to share additional records.
Moore's intelligence work is not part of the public record, Collins stated in his e-mail. "Mr. Moore worked for various agencies during his military service such that his records are kept outside of the NPRS," he wrote.
"I hear that all the time," replied Master Sergeant Keith O'Donnell, a spokesman for the Army Human Resources Command. O'Donnell said he checked the Army's classified holdings and protected data bases that log the educational records of enlisted and commissioned personnel. Moore's record shows none of the training that would be required of an Army Intelligence officer, he said.
O'Donnell pointed out that service personnel are retired at their highest rank, and Moore was discharged from the Reserves as a grade of Sergeant (E5), meaning he was never an officer.
"He never went anywhere with a military career," O'Donnell said.
'A tissue of lies and deception'
Moore did not go into the military after graduating from college, according to fraternity brothers and former business associates. They say Moore moved to Australia after graduation from DePauw in December 1986. By March 1988 he was working as an equity options trader at a bank in Sydney and moonlighting for a company called Eurotek that imported and resold used cars.
Court records show that the Australian customs service raided Eurotek's office in May 1989, seizing five cars and documents that showed Moore had kept two sets of records, one of which systematically undervalued the imported cars.
In February 1992 Moore was indicted and convicted of deceptively obtaining over $300,000 in connection with the used car business, according to court records (PDF). He was sentenced to a 16-month prison term. He was released after serving a portion of his sentence. In 1993 he testified against his former Eurotek associate in a related criminal trial in Sydney.
The judge in the second case described Moore as a key figure in the enterprise, which procured used Rolls Royces and Porsches in the Chicago area and shipped them to Australia with fraudulent documentation of their value. The cars were then resold at a profit. While accepting some of Moore's testimony, Judge J. Byrne said Moore was "a man who had so enshrouded himself in a tissue of lies and deception as to be a witness whose credit is of little value."
Byrne ruled that Moore's associate, an Indonesian man named Hiran Jayakody, was "the moving spirit" behind Eurtotek. Jayakody was ordered to pay a fine of approximately $1 million. At the date of Moore's discharge from the U.S. Army Reserves in April 1994, he was still fighting legal charges in Australia.
In December 1994, Moore's 1992 conviction was reversed. Though Moore had admitted that he acted to defraud Australian customs agency, the Eurotek trial raised doubts about the evidence used to convict him and his conviction was struck from the record.
In 1995, Moore enrolled in the University of Chicago business school. He received his master's of business administration in 1997, according to school records. A year later he filed for bankruptcy in Chicago, declaring that he was $2.7 million in debt and his two companies, Advanced Mittworks, Inc. and Knight International, were insolvent.
In a biography submitted last year to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation in support of his bid for state tax incentives, Moore stated that Knight International included two companies and that "each was sold upon reaching revenue in the $50M range."
'Best Business Practices'
Moore was operating a software company in Chicago in the summer of 2002 when he first made contact with the men behind Triple Canopy. According to a court filing submitted by Moore's attorneys in the pending Illinois fraud lawsuit, Moore entered e-mail discussions with Matthew Mann, a former Delta Force veteran, about establishing a private security firm. Mann is listed on the Triple Canopy Web site as a co-founder of the company with a Special Forces veteran named Tom Fortis. Mann and Fortis declined to be interviewed for this article.
The company was founded in Chicago in 2003, according to its Web site. Moore was involved with the company by July 2003 when he applied to register trademarks for "Triple Canopy Group" and 90 other related names with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
After Triple Canopy started winning contracts in Iraq in late 2003, Moore presented himself as a leader in the burgeoning industry of private military contractors. In February 2004, he represented the company at a $995-a-seat business forum held at the National Press Club in Washington. He recommended that firms looking to do business in Iraq should find a local partner.
"You are in a position to mentor them and help them with perhaps best business practices from your country or your world, and at the same time, you're in a position to try to offer a series of services or products that don't exist in Iraq," Moore said.
In March 2004, Moore donated $2,000 to George Bush's re-election committee and identified himself as the CEO of Triple Canopy, according to federal election records.
Less than a month later, he was fired by Triple Canopy's board of directors. In a lawsuit filed in May 2004, the company charged him with fraud, with raiding the company treasury for his own profit, and seizing control of the company's Web addresses and communications infrastructure as a bargaining chip in negotiations of a severance package.
Moore denied the charges, saying he used company funds for business expenses with the knowledge of his colleagues. The lawsuit was settled out of court in September 2005. The terms of the agreement are confidential, but according to bank records filed in the Illinois fraud lawsuit, Moore received a $6 million payment in March 2006 identified as "Triple Canopy settlement."
Why did Moore's legal problems in Australia, his bankruptcy and his apparent misrepresentation of his military background not surface when it came to gaining millions of dollars in security contracts with the U.S. government?
One reason, according to the Office of Defense Trade Controls (ODTC), is that officers of companies applying for Iraq contracts need only swear that they have not been convicted of violations of the U.S. defense export laws.
"We might want to look at changing that," said Dave Trimble, chief of ODTC's compliance and registration division. "We have broad authority to take any derogatory information into account."
Where the PMC industry is going
Moore's latest venture in northern Michigan has won official support while stirring local opposition.
Moore's colleagues say he is eager to commercialize the market for privatized disaster response. Rick Johnson, the former speaker of the Michigan Legislature who now serves as Sovereign Deed's lobbyist, said Moore is "taking the industry where it needs to go next."
A community group calling itself We Don't Need Sovereign Deed says the company's claims of economic benefits are unsupported and that the idea of privatizing disaster response is undemocratic.
Moore's proposal to establish an operational center in the town of Pellston has been endorsed by a bipartisan cast of state officials. Earlier this year, Democratic state Sen. Gary MacDowell and Republican state Sen. Jason Allen drafted a bill to grant tax abatements to encourage Sovereign Deed to locate on 700 acres of municipal property adjacent to an airport. The state Legislature unanimously approved the bill, which was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Opponents have asked questions about a proposed long-term lease of 700 acres of municipal property and the construction of a hangar to accommodate army cargo planes in Sovereign Deed operations. Elected officials in Pellston have declined to answer the questions, citing confidentiality agreements with the firm.
"Moore's smart," said resident Tim Boyko. "He set it up so people cannot question, and it's like these local officials' brains short out when they get around retired generals and homeland security-type people."
Credit: Photo of Barrett H. Moore courtesy of DePauw University archives.
Catch the rest of Michigan Messenger's coverage of Sovereign Deed at this link.
Tags: Sovereign Deed, Jason Allen, security, privatization of disaster response, private security company, MI Disaster Capitalism, (All Tags)
Sovereign Deed CEO lied about military service, records show
by: Eartha Jane Melzer
Thursday (01/17) at 12:07 PM
Contractor made millions claiming Army stripes
In December 2003, the founders of Triple Canopy, a private security firm in Baghdad, caught their first big break, signing a contract with the Coalition Provisional Authority governing Iraq. Within four months, Triple Canopy had signed six contracts worth more than $28 million to guard U.S. facilities throughout Iraq.
For the military veterans who founded the company and Barrett H. Moore, who was then Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, these agreements launched the company on the path to what it is today: one of the leading private military contractors, sharing a $1 billion contract with Blackwater USA and DynCorp to guard U.S. personnel in the Middle East.
Moore, 43, a Chicago businessman, now presents himself as a former U.S. Army Intelligence officer and business "visionary" who revolutionized the private security market but an Army spokesman said Moore was never an officer and never had intelligence training. Moore, fired by Triple Canopy in 2004, has launched a new private security firm called Sovereign Deed. He has parlayed his Triple Canopy success into political influence, persuading Republican and Democratic state officials to rewrite state law so that Sovereign Deed can receive $10 million in tax abatements and other incentives to establish a "national response center" for its private disaster relief business in northern Michigan.
Continued -
Eartha Jane Melzer :: Sovereign Deed CEO lied about military service, records show
In promoting Sovereign Deed, Moore has emphasized the military expertise of himself and the company's top officials. On the company's Web site, Moore states that he "served as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, specializing in issues related to the non-proliferation of biological weapons and related weapons of mass destruction (WMD)."
What Moore's Pentagon patrons and political allies in Michigan have not known is the true story of Moore's military service. According to U.S. Army record keepers, Moore never completed his Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program in college and was discharged from an inactive branch of the Reserves in 1994 without ever having gone through basic training. Contrary to the claims on Sovereign Deed's Web site, Moore never served as an Army intelligence officer, or in any other branch of the country's armed forces.
Moore's brushes with law enforcement also escape detection. He was convicted of three counts of criminal fraud in Australia in 1992 and served time in prison, according to court records there. An appeals court later reversed Moore's conviction. But in a related criminal trial, Moore acknowledged participating in an "illegal enterprise" to smuggle cars from Chicago to Melbourne and admitted fabricating documents as part of the operation.
Moore did not return phone calls requesting comment.
Moore's story is another chapter in the remarkable emergence of private military contractors (PMCs) since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Caught shorthanded after the U.S. invasion in 2003, American authorities scrambled to find protection for U.S. facilities and personnel with few procedures for vetting the contractors' background or controlling their activities. As PMCs like Triple Canopy and Blackwater USA grew, their armed employees became embroiled in unprovoked shooting incidents and the killing of Iraqi civilians, and Congress and the State Department launched investigations that are still ongoing.
As the Barrett Moore story illustrates, the rise of the PMCs came at the expense of accountability. When Michigan Messenger reconstructed his career, the returning war zone entrepreneur who boasted to Michigan residents and politicians of an Army Intelligence career turns out to have more experience as a used car salesman.
Selling Military Expertise
According to interviews and public records, Barrett Holloway Moore, 43, is a creative businessman whose audacious style has won admirers and alienated former business partners.
In 1995, he made headlines in Chicago when he successfully proposed marriage to lawyer Mary Szews by hiring a helicopter to wave a banner outside the window of her office on the 73rd story of the Sears Tower. Last year, Moore registered more trademarks with government on behalf of Sovereign Deed than all but five U.S. corporations.
Moore has been sued for fraud three times since 2005, according to court records. One of the lawsuits has been settled, one went to arbitration with unknown results, and a third is still pending in Illinois state court.
Moore and his associates at Sovereign Deed have emphasized military experience as a key feature of the company. The firm's spokesman in northern Michigan is retired Brigadier General Richard Mills, a former deputy commanding general for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
In community meetings about Sovereign Deed's plans in November, Mills received hearty applause when he was introduced as a 30-year military veteran. He said he was proud to associate with veterans whom he called "the most magnificent of people."
In a phone interview Mills said that Moore was among the people who brought military experience to Sovereign Deed, adding he knew people who had served with him. He declined to provide any names.
But a spokesman for the National Personnel Records Service in St. Louis, which maintains records on all armed service personnel, said the NPRS has no record of Moore's service. Another search by the Army Human Resources Command in Alexandria, Va., determined that Moore never completed his college ROTC training at DePauw University in Indiana in 1985-86, had never gone into basic training or been on active duty or had intelligence responsibilities.
In response to questions from Michigan Messenger, a Sovereign Deed official stressed the accusation, if true, was quite serious.
"Stating that one has falsified military service goes to the very core of pride, honor, and integrity of those who have served," wrote Glenn Collins, the chief operating officer of Sovereign Deed, in an email.
Collins provided three documents that he said supported Moore's claims to have served in U.S. Army Intelligence.
The first document Sovereign Deed provided was a letter, dated Sept. 11, 1985, from Col. Nicholas Fritsch who served as the lieutenant commander of the 476th Military Intelligence Detachment in Indianapolis. As a member of ROTC, Moore served in the unit under Fritsch's command.
"Cadet Moore is one of the most impressive service members with whom I have served throughout my career," Fritsch wrote in recommending Moore for commission as a military intelligence officer." "…[He] has shown the personal traits and skills of a natural leader."
In a telephone interview with Michigan Messenger, Fritsch, now retired and living in Florida, recalled Moore as "a high school all-star type, … good looking, … smart, possibly athletic, a person of tremendous capability."
Fritsch said that Moore's claim of Army intelligence service was "making a mountain out of a mole hill."
"At the level of Moore's service he would have no first-line connection to high-ranking intelligence," Fritsch said. He added that he thought public boasting about intelligence work was inappropriate because it could compromise security.
The second document provided by Sovereign Deed was a May 1986 letter notifying Moore of his transfer to a U.S. Army Reserve unit until his expected graduation later in the year. The third document was an honorable discharge certificate dated April 21, 1994. Moore's rank at the time of discharge was blacked out on the copy of the document provided by Sovereign Deed.
The records confirm that Moore participated in the ROTC program as an undergraduate but provide no evidence of active duty intelligence work. Collins did not respond to a request to share additional records.
Moore's intelligence work is not part of the public record, Collins stated in his e-mail. "Mr. Moore worked for various agencies during his military service such that his records are kept outside of the NPRS," he wrote.
"I hear that all the time," replied Master Sergeant Keith O'Donnell, a spokesman for the Army Human Resources Command. O'Donnell said he checked the Army's classified holdings and protected data bases that log the educational records of enlisted and commissioned personnel. Moore's record shows none of the training that would be required of an Army Intelligence officer, he said.
O'Donnell pointed out that service personnel are retired at their highest rank, and Moore was discharged from the Reserves as a grade of Sergeant (E5), meaning he was never an officer.
"He never went anywhere with a military career," O'Donnell said.
'A tissue of lies and deception'
Moore did not go into the military after graduating from college, according to fraternity brothers and former business associates. They say Moore moved to Australia after graduation from DePauw in December 1986. By March 1988 he was working as an equity options trader at a bank in Sydney and moonlighting for a company called Eurotek that imported and resold used cars.
Court records show that the Australian customs service raided Eurotek's office in May 1989, seizing five cars and documents that showed Moore had kept two sets of records, one of which systematically undervalued the imported cars.
In February 1992 Moore was indicted and convicted of deceptively obtaining over $300,000 in connection with the used car business, according to court records (PDF). He was sentenced to a 16-month prison term. He was released after serving a portion of his sentence. In 1993 he testified against his former Eurotek associate in a related criminal trial in Sydney.
The judge in the second case described Moore as a key figure in the enterprise, which procured used Rolls Royces and Porsches in the Chicago area and shipped them to Australia with fraudulent documentation of their value. The cars were then resold at a profit. While accepting some of Moore's testimony, Judge J. Byrne said Moore was "a man who had so enshrouded himself in a tissue of lies and deception as to be a witness whose credit is of little value."
Byrne ruled that Moore's associate, an Indonesian man named Hiran Jayakody, was "the moving spirit" behind Eurtotek. Jayakody was ordered to pay a fine of approximately $1 million. At the date of Moore's discharge from the U.S. Army Reserves in April 1994, he was still fighting legal charges in Australia.
In December 1994, Moore's 1992 conviction was reversed. Though Moore had admitted that he acted to defraud Australian customs agency, the Eurotek trial raised doubts about the evidence used to convict him and his conviction was struck from the record.
In 1995, Moore enrolled in the University of Chicago business school. He received his master's of business administration in 1997, according to school records. A year later he filed for bankruptcy in Chicago, declaring that he was $2.7 million in debt and his two companies, Advanced Mittworks, Inc. and Knight International, were insolvent.
In a biography submitted last year to the Michigan Economic Development Corporation in support of his bid for state tax incentives, Moore stated that Knight International included two companies and that "each was sold upon reaching revenue in the $50M range."
'Best Business Practices'
Moore was operating a software company in Chicago in the summer of 2002 when he first made contact with the men behind Triple Canopy. According to a court filing submitted by Moore's attorneys in the pending Illinois fraud lawsuit, Moore entered e-mail discussions with Matthew Mann, a former Delta Force veteran, about establishing a private security firm. Mann is listed on the Triple Canopy Web site as a co-founder of the company with a Special Forces veteran named Tom Fortis. Mann and Fortis declined to be interviewed for this article.
The company was founded in Chicago in 2003, according to its Web site. Moore was involved with the company by July 2003 when he applied to register trademarks for "Triple Canopy Group" and 90 other related names with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
After Triple Canopy started winning contracts in Iraq in late 2003, Moore presented himself as a leader in the burgeoning industry of private military contractors. In February 2004, he represented the company at a $995-a-seat business forum held at the National Press Club in Washington. He recommended that firms looking to do business in Iraq should find a local partner.
"You are in a position to mentor them and help them with perhaps best business practices from your country or your world, and at the same time, you're in a position to try to offer a series of services or products that don't exist in Iraq," Moore said.
In March 2004, Moore donated $2,000 to George Bush's re-election committee and identified himself as the CEO of Triple Canopy, according to federal election records.
Less than a month later, he was fired by Triple Canopy's board of directors. In a lawsuit filed in May 2004, the company charged him with fraud, with raiding the company treasury for his own profit, and seizing control of the company's Web addresses and communications infrastructure as a bargaining chip in negotiations of a severance package.
Moore denied the charges, saying he used company funds for business expenses with the knowledge of his colleagues. The lawsuit was settled out of court in September 2005. The terms of the agreement are confidential, but according to bank records filed in the Illinois fraud lawsuit, Moore received a $6 million payment in March 2006 identified as "Triple Canopy settlement."
Why did Moore's legal problems in Australia, his bankruptcy and his apparent misrepresentation of his military background not surface when it came to gaining millions of dollars in security contracts with the U.S. government?
One reason, according to the Office of Defense Trade Controls (ODTC), is that officers of companies applying for Iraq contracts need only swear that they have not been convicted of violations of the U.S. defense export laws.
"We might want to look at changing that," said Dave Trimble, chief of ODTC's compliance and registration division. "We have broad authority to take any derogatory information into account."
Where the PMC industry is going
Moore's latest venture in northern Michigan has won official support while stirring local opposition.
Moore's colleagues say he is eager to commercialize the market for privatized disaster response. Rick Johnson, the former speaker of the Michigan Legislature who now serves as Sovereign Deed's lobbyist, said Moore is "taking the industry where it needs to go next."
A community group calling itself We Don't Need Sovereign Deed says the company's claims of economic benefits are unsupported and that the idea of privatizing disaster response is undemocratic.
Moore's proposal to establish an operational center in the town of Pellston has been endorsed by a bipartisan cast of state officials. Earlier this year, Democratic state Sen. Gary MacDowell and Republican state Sen. Jason Allen drafted a bill to grant tax abatements to encourage Sovereign Deed to locate on 700 acres of municipal property adjacent to an airport. The state Legislature unanimously approved the bill, which was signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
Opponents have asked questions about a proposed long-term lease of 700 acres of municipal property and the construction of a hangar to accommodate army cargo planes in Sovereign Deed operations. Elected officials in Pellston have declined to answer the questions, citing confidentiality agreements with the firm.
"Moore's smart," said resident Tim Boyko. "He set it up so people cannot question, and it's like these local officials' brains short out when they get around retired generals and homeland security-type people."
Credit: Photo of Barrett H. Moore courtesy of DePauw University archives.
Catch the rest of Michigan Messenger's coverage of Sovereign Deed at this link.
Tags: Sovereign Deed, Jason Allen, security, privatization of disaster response, private security company, MI Disaster Capitalism, (All Tags)
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Sovereign wealth fund
Sovereign wealth fund
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Sovereign wealth funds)
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A Sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is a fund owned by a state composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, property or other financial instruments.
Sovereign wealth funds are, broadly defined, entities that can manage the national savings for the purposes of investment. The accumulated funds may have their origin in, or may represent foreign currency deposits, gold, SDRs and IMF reserve position held by central banks and monetary authorities, along with other national assets such as pension investments, oil funds, or other industrial and financial holdings. These are assets of the sovereign nations which are typically (but not necessarily) held in domestic and different reserve currencies such as the dollar, euro and yen. The names attributed to the management entities may include central banks, official investment companies, state pension funds, sovereign oil funds and so on.
There have been attempts to distinguish funds held by sovereign entities from foreign exchange reserves held by central banks. The former can be characterized as maximizing long term return, with the latter serving short term currency stabilization and liquidity management. This distinction points in the right direction, but is still unsatisfactory. Many central banks in recent years possess reserves massively in excess of needs for liquidity or foreign exchange management. Moreover it is widely believed most have diversified hugely into assets other than short term, highly liquid monetary ones (almost no data is available however to back up this assertion). Some central banks even have begun buying equities, or derivatives of differing ilk (even if fairly safe ones, like Overnight Interest rate swaps).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Sovereign wealth funds)
Jump to: navigation, search
A Sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is a fund owned by a state composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, property or other financial instruments.
Sovereign wealth funds are, broadly defined, entities that can manage the national savings for the purposes of investment. The accumulated funds may have their origin in, or may represent foreign currency deposits, gold, SDRs and IMF reserve position held by central banks and monetary authorities, along with other national assets such as pension investments, oil funds, or other industrial and financial holdings. These are assets of the sovereign nations which are typically (but not necessarily) held in domestic and different reserve currencies such as the dollar, euro and yen. The names attributed to the management entities may include central banks, official investment companies, state pension funds, sovereign oil funds and so on.
There have been attempts to distinguish funds held by sovereign entities from foreign exchange reserves held by central banks. The former can be characterized as maximizing long term return, with the latter serving short term currency stabilization and liquidity management. This distinction points in the right direction, but is still unsatisfactory. Many central banks in recent years possess reserves massively in excess of needs for liquidity or foreign exchange management. Moreover it is widely believed most have diversified hugely into assets other than short term, highly liquid monetary ones (almost no data is available however to back up this assertion). Some central banks even have begun buying equities, or derivatives of differing ilk (even if fairly safe ones, like Overnight Interest rate swaps).
America for Sale
Sovereign-wealth funds
The world's most expensive club
May 24th 2007 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition
China's investment in Blackstone shows how government investors are flourishing at the heart of the financial system
Satoshi Kambayashi
WITH $1.2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves and the pool growing by more than $1 billion every day, China casts a giant's shadow over the global financial markets, even if it has mostly used the money to pile up American Treasury bonds. The announcement on May 21st that it would invest $3 billion of its reserves in Blackstone, a New York-based private-equity firm soon to issue shares, shows that it is prepared to barge into murky private markets as well as liquid public ones. It is not the only inscrutable country to be cosying up to the inscrutable private-equity industry. Around the world, a secretive society is emerging of governments flush with foreign assets, some of them petrodollars, that are increasingly calling the shots in international finance. The Blackstone deal is likely to stir others to invest their money even farther away from prying eyes than they do already.
Like China, whose proposed Blackstone stake is part of $300 billion that the government plans to set aside this year for investment purposes, dozens of countries have set up what are now commonly referred to as sovereign-wealth funds. They manage money drawn from reserves, natural-resource payments and the like. China is chiefly concerned to diversify its foreign reserves, but other sovereign-wealth funds own national, as well as international, assets.
The top 12 each have anything from $20 billion to hundreds of billions of dollars to invest (see table). Recently, Japan, Russia and India have reportedly been considering setting up funds along similar lines. Some estimates put the size of the funds at $2.5 trillion by the end of this year (in contrast, hedge funds are thought to have a mere $1.6 trillion), with another $450 billion in transfers from reserves being added annually. Including capital appreciation, the amount could swell to $12 trillion by 2015.
To the extent governments have traditionally held investment assets, it was to protect domestic currencies and banks from crisis. Since the funds were for emergencies, they were of a type that could be liquidated easily—initially the holdings were in precious metals, lately they have been in dollars. The idea of building up an endowment to replace shrinking natural resources did not exist.
That process may have started inadvertently in 1956 when the British administration of the Gilbert Islands in Micronesia put a levy on the export of phosphates—bird manure—used in fertiliser. The manure has long since been depleted. However, a once-tiny set-aside of money has become the Kiribati Revenue Equalisation Reserve Fund, a $520m investment portfolio that has grown to about nine times the tiny atoll's GDP.
A similar approach is now common among oil-producing countries, which, it is estimated, account for two-thirds of the assets in these sovereign-wealth funds, and are keen to diversify their national revenues, aware that their wealth is being pumped away. They have typically invested along similar lines to central banks, holding bonds, dollars and bank deposits. Temasek, a Singaporean entity created in 1974 to pool state-owned investments, started to change the mindset. It subsequently evolved into an even more complex investment vehicle. The heady combination of state-control, success and secrecy, entranced other governments.
Recently, central bankers have also begun wondering whether they have a fiduciary duty to make higher returns from the public wealth under their supervision, which could mean placing at least some part of foreign-exchange reserves in high-yielding, if less liquid, investments. In Asia this question has become increasingly pertinent in the past two years, as reserves have mushroomed.
The result has been a torrent of money into a finite pool of assets. There is no precedent for such fortunes suddenly to find their way into global financial markets, and they help explain the waterfall of liquidity that has driven up the value of risky (and less risky) assets of all descriptions around the world. The world's entire supply of shares is $55 trillion, and bonds account for a similar amount. Sovereign-wealth funds could soon become the most important buyers of such assets, and many others besides. If so, the world will witness the intriguing spectacle of its largest private companies being owned by governments whose belief in capitalism is often partial.
The last time governments were this involved in sinking money into private assets, the process tended to be called nationalisation. Now the funds are invested both abroad and domestically. A new term will have to be coined: internationalisation, perhaps.
Northern light
Of the biggest sovereign funds, only Norway's provides anything close to transparency. Each year it discloses its investment portfolios and returns. Without such a window on their investments, it is hard to fathom the interests of other funds—how they vote on shareholder motions, for example. There are likely to be questions about strategic objectives, too. What will they care about most? Economic returns, political objectives, securing strategic resources? It will be hard to tell.
Andrew Rozanov, of State Street Bank, argues that the lack of well-defined obligations and the ability to retain funds indefinitely while not having to reveal results is an investment advantage. The funds can harvest the benefits of volatility and illiquidity unavailable to the risk averse. It would not be surprising if some did particularly well. On the other hand, the same factors that could lead to higher returns could also lead to corruption and untoward political intervention.
But the kind of assets the funds invest in—big ones—can generate frictions even when run properly. Temasek has been embroiled in controversy in Thailand after it bought Shin Corp, one of the country's telecoms companies, from Thaksin Shinawatra, the country's deposed prime minister. China is no stranger to such tensions. In an event that still rankles, CNOOC, the state-controlled oil company, was blocked in America, supposedly on national-security grounds from acquiring Unocal, an oil company. It is quite possible that by purchasing a non-voting interest in Blackstone, China will be able to bypass the restrictions that might prevent it doing Unocal-style deals in Europe and America.
By choosing a private-equity firm, China will also be able to invest directly in a partner that, notwithstanding its forthcoming share offering, can keep many of its operations out of the public eye. But this is where the ironies of the deal are most apparent. “Crony capitalism? It is a marriage made in heaven—a partnership that does not want investors to ask questions with a country whose firms do not want investors to ask questions. I worry about the serious conflicts of interest this generates. More generally, government entities shouldn't be in the business of investing in private firms,” opines Raghuram Rajan, of the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.
Moreover, it is widely believed that by having China as a partner, Blackstone will receive preferential access to China's market (as well as providing China with experience it clearly covets on how to set up its own domestic private-equity industry). This is an advantage for Blackstone, and for its shareholders, China included, particularly so when other private-equity firms complain that the impediments to operating in China are growing.
However, providing an economic incentive to a lucky few, even if that includes the government itself, impedes China's broader need to create a fair and transparent financial market for all participants. That is what would produce the most efficient market for capital.
China still has vast holdings of state assets, and its embryonic stockmarket is bubbling over—if anything it needs more publicly traded companies. Like other countries with sovereign-wealth funds, it would appear to need more expertise in selling companies that it owns, rather than learning how to buy the ones it does not.
The world's most expensive club
May 24th 2007 | HONG KONG
From The Economist print edition
China's investment in Blackstone shows how government investors are flourishing at the heart of the financial system
Satoshi Kambayashi
WITH $1.2 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves and the pool growing by more than $1 billion every day, China casts a giant's shadow over the global financial markets, even if it has mostly used the money to pile up American Treasury bonds. The announcement on May 21st that it would invest $3 billion of its reserves in Blackstone, a New York-based private-equity firm soon to issue shares, shows that it is prepared to barge into murky private markets as well as liquid public ones. It is not the only inscrutable country to be cosying up to the inscrutable private-equity industry. Around the world, a secretive society is emerging of governments flush with foreign assets, some of them petrodollars, that are increasingly calling the shots in international finance. The Blackstone deal is likely to stir others to invest their money even farther away from prying eyes than they do already.
Like China, whose proposed Blackstone stake is part of $300 billion that the government plans to set aside this year for investment purposes, dozens of countries have set up what are now commonly referred to as sovereign-wealth funds. They manage money drawn from reserves, natural-resource payments and the like. China is chiefly concerned to diversify its foreign reserves, but other sovereign-wealth funds own national, as well as international, assets.
The top 12 each have anything from $20 billion to hundreds of billions of dollars to invest (see table). Recently, Japan, Russia and India have reportedly been considering setting up funds along similar lines. Some estimates put the size of the funds at $2.5 trillion by the end of this year (in contrast, hedge funds are thought to have a mere $1.6 trillion), with another $450 billion in transfers from reserves being added annually. Including capital appreciation, the amount could swell to $12 trillion by 2015.
To the extent governments have traditionally held investment assets, it was to protect domestic currencies and banks from crisis. Since the funds were for emergencies, they were of a type that could be liquidated easily—initially the holdings were in precious metals, lately they have been in dollars. The idea of building up an endowment to replace shrinking natural resources did not exist.
That process may have started inadvertently in 1956 when the British administration of the Gilbert Islands in Micronesia put a levy on the export of phosphates—bird manure—used in fertiliser. The manure has long since been depleted. However, a once-tiny set-aside of money has become the Kiribati Revenue Equalisation Reserve Fund, a $520m investment portfolio that has grown to about nine times the tiny atoll's GDP.
A similar approach is now common among oil-producing countries, which, it is estimated, account for two-thirds of the assets in these sovereign-wealth funds, and are keen to diversify their national revenues, aware that their wealth is being pumped away. They have typically invested along similar lines to central banks, holding bonds, dollars and bank deposits. Temasek, a Singaporean entity created in 1974 to pool state-owned investments, started to change the mindset. It subsequently evolved into an even more complex investment vehicle. The heady combination of state-control, success and secrecy, entranced other governments.
Recently, central bankers have also begun wondering whether they have a fiduciary duty to make higher returns from the public wealth under their supervision, which could mean placing at least some part of foreign-exchange reserves in high-yielding, if less liquid, investments. In Asia this question has become increasingly pertinent in the past two years, as reserves have mushroomed.
The result has been a torrent of money into a finite pool of assets. There is no precedent for such fortunes suddenly to find their way into global financial markets, and they help explain the waterfall of liquidity that has driven up the value of risky (and less risky) assets of all descriptions around the world. The world's entire supply of shares is $55 trillion, and bonds account for a similar amount. Sovereign-wealth funds could soon become the most important buyers of such assets, and many others besides. If so, the world will witness the intriguing spectacle of its largest private companies being owned by governments whose belief in capitalism is often partial.
The last time governments were this involved in sinking money into private assets, the process tended to be called nationalisation. Now the funds are invested both abroad and domestically. A new term will have to be coined: internationalisation, perhaps.
Northern light
Of the biggest sovereign funds, only Norway's provides anything close to transparency. Each year it discloses its investment portfolios and returns. Without such a window on their investments, it is hard to fathom the interests of other funds—how they vote on shareholder motions, for example. There are likely to be questions about strategic objectives, too. What will they care about most? Economic returns, political objectives, securing strategic resources? It will be hard to tell.
Andrew Rozanov, of State Street Bank, argues that the lack of well-defined obligations and the ability to retain funds indefinitely while not having to reveal results is an investment advantage. The funds can harvest the benefits of volatility and illiquidity unavailable to the risk averse. It would not be surprising if some did particularly well. On the other hand, the same factors that could lead to higher returns could also lead to corruption and untoward political intervention.
But the kind of assets the funds invest in—big ones—can generate frictions even when run properly. Temasek has been embroiled in controversy in Thailand after it bought Shin Corp, one of the country's telecoms companies, from Thaksin Shinawatra, the country's deposed prime minister. China is no stranger to such tensions. In an event that still rankles, CNOOC, the state-controlled oil company, was blocked in America, supposedly on national-security grounds from acquiring Unocal, an oil company. It is quite possible that by purchasing a non-voting interest in Blackstone, China will be able to bypass the restrictions that might prevent it doing Unocal-style deals in Europe and America.
By choosing a private-equity firm, China will also be able to invest directly in a partner that, notwithstanding its forthcoming share offering, can keep many of its operations out of the public eye. But this is where the ironies of the deal are most apparent. “Crony capitalism? It is a marriage made in heaven—a partnership that does not want investors to ask questions with a country whose firms do not want investors to ask questions. I worry about the serious conflicts of interest this generates. More generally, government entities shouldn't be in the business of investing in private firms,” opines Raghuram Rajan, of the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.
Moreover, it is widely believed that by having China as a partner, Blackstone will receive preferential access to China's market (as well as providing China with experience it clearly covets on how to set up its own domestic private-equity industry). This is an advantage for Blackstone, and for its shareholders, China included, particularly so when other private-equity firms complain that the impediments to operating in China are growing.
However, providing an economic incentive to a lucky few, even if that includes the government itself, impedes China's broader need to create a fair and transparent financial market for all participants. That is what would produce the most efficient market for capital.
China still has vast holdings of state assets, and its embryonic stockmarket is bubbling over—if anything it needs more publicly traded companies. Like other countries with sovereign-wealth funds, it would appear to need more expertise in selling companies that it owns, rather than learning how to buy the ones it does not.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Principal motive for the tapes' destruction....CIA
In a classified response to the station chief, Rodriguez ordered the tapes' destruction, CIA officials say. The Justice Department and the House intelligence committee are now investigating whether that deed constituted a violation of law or an obstruction of justice. John A. Rizzo, the CIA's acting general counsel, is scheduled to discuss the matter in a closed House intelligence committee hearing scheduled for Wednesday.
According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials familiar with the debate, the taping was conducted from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee's death.
The principal motive for the tapes' destruction was the clandestine operations division's worry that the tapes' fate could be snatched out of their hands, the officials said. They feared that the agency could be publicly shamed and that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional inquiry - a circumstance now partly unfolding anyway.
"The professionals said that we must destroy the tapes because they didn't want to see the pictures all over television, and they knew they eventually would leak," said a former agency official who took part in the discussions before the tapes were pulverized. The presence of the tapes in Bangkok and the CIA's communications with the station chief there were described by current and former officials.
Congressional investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration openly advocated the tapes' destruction, according to officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to Capitol Hill. "It was an agency decision - you can take it to the bank," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday. "Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong."
Many of those involved recalled conversations in which senior CIA and White House officials advised against destroying the tapes, but without expressly prohibiting it, leaving an odd vacuum of specific instructions on a such a politically sensitive matter. They said that Rodriguez then interpreted this silence - the absence of a decision to order the tapes' preservation - as a tacit approval of their destruction.
"Jose could not get any specific direction out of his leadership" in 2005, one senior official said. Word of the resulting destruction, one former official said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately, by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed on exchanges between the two men.
"Frankly, there were more important issues that needed to be focused on, such as trying to preserve a critical [interrogation] program and salvage relationships that had been damaged because of the leaks" about the existence of the secret prisons, said a former agency official familiar with Goss' position at the time.
Rodriguez, whom the CIA honored with a medal in August for "Extraordinary Fidelity and Essential Service," declined requests for an interview. But his attorney said he acted in the belief that he was carrying out the agency's stated intention for nearly three years. "Since 2002, the CIA wanted to destroy the tapes to protect the identity and lives of its officers and for other counterintelligence reasons," Bennett said in a written response to questions from the Washington Post.
"In 2003 the leadership of intelligence committees were told about the CIA's intent to destroy the tapes. In 2005, CIA lawyers again advised the National Clandestine Service that they had the authority to destroy the tapes and it was legal to do so. It is unfortunate," Bennett continued, "that under the pressure of a Congressional and criminal investigation, history is now being revised, and some people are running for cover."
Recorded on the tapes was the coercive questioning of two senior al-Qaeda suspects: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida,and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were captured by U.S. forces in 2002. They show Zubaida undergoing waterboarding, which involved strapping him to a board and pouring water over his nose and mouth, creating the sensation of imminent drowning. Nashiri later also underwent the same treatment.
Some CIA officials say the agency's use of waterboarding helped extract information that led to the capture of other key al-Qaeda members and prevented attacks. But others, including former CIA, FBI and military officials, say the practice constitutes torture.
The destruction of the tapes was not the first occasion in which Rodriguez got in trouble for taking a provocative action to help a colleague. While serving as the CIA's Latin America division chief in 1996, he appealed to local Dominican Republic authorities to prevent a childhood friend, and CIA contractor, who had been arrested in a drug investigation, from being beaten up, according to a former CIA official familiar with the episode.
Such an intervention was forbidden by CIA rules, and so Rodriguez was stripped of his management post and reprimanded in an inspector general's report. Shortly after the reprimand, he was named station chief in Mexico City, Mexico, and, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was promoted to deputy director of the fast-expanding counterterrorism center. He served under the center's director then, J. Cofer Black, who had been his subordinate in the Latin America division.
When Black - who played a key role in setting up the secret prisons and instituting the interrogation policy - left the CIA in December 2002, Rodriguez took his place. Colleagues recall that even in the deputy's slot, Rodriguez was aware of the videotaping of Zubaida, and that he later told several it was necessary so that experts, such as psychologists not present during interrogations, could view Zubaida's physical reactions to questions.
By December 2002, the taping was no longer needed, according to three former intelligence officials. "Zubaida's health was better, and he was providing information that we could check out," one said.
An internal probe of the interrogations by the CIA's inspector general began in early 2003 for reasons that have not been disclosed. In February of that year, then-CIA General Counsel Scott W. Muller told lawmakers that the agency planned to destroy the tapes after the completion of the investigation. That year, all waterboarding was halted; and at an undisclosed time, several of the inspector general's deputies traveled to Bangkok to view the tapes, officials said.
In May 2004, CIA operatives became concerned when a Washington Post article disclosed that the CIA had conducted its interrogations under a new, looser Bush administration definition of what legally constituted torture, several former CIA officials said. The disclosure sparked an internal Justice Department review of that definition and led to a suspension of the CIA's harsh interrogation program.
The tapes were discussed with White House lawyers twice, according to a senior U.S. official. The first occasion was a meeting convened by Muller and senior lawyers of the White House and the Justice Department specifically to discuss their fate. The other discussion was described by one participant as "fleeting," when the existence of the tapes came up during a spring 2004 meeting to discuss the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, said the official.
Those known to have counseled against the tapes' destruction include John B. Bellinger III, while serving as the national Security Council's top legal adviser; Harriet E. Miers, while serving as the top White House counsel; George J. Tenet, while serving as CIA director; Muller, while serving as the CIA's general counsel; and John D. Negroponte, while serving as director of national intelligence.
Hayden, in an interview, said the advice expressed by administration lawyers was consistent. "To the degree this was discussed outside the agency, everyone counseled caution," he said. But he said that, in 2005, it was "the agency's view that there were no legal impediments" to the tapes' destruction. There also was "genuine concern about agency people being identified," were the tapes ever to be made public.
Hayden, who became CIA director last year, acknowledged that the questions raised about the tapes' destruction, then and now, are legitimate. "One can ask if it was a good idea, or if there was a better way to do it," he said. "We are very happy to let the facts take us where they will."
Intellpuke: You can read this article by Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, reporting from from Washington, D.C., in context here: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR2008011504090.html?hpid=topnews
Washington Post staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials familiar with the debate, the taping was conducted from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee's death.
The principal motive for the tapes' destruction was the clandestine operations division's worry that the tapes' fate could be snatched out of their hands, the officials said. They feared that the agency could be publicly shamed and that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional inquiry - a circumstance now partly unfolding anyway.
"The professionals said that we must destroy the tapes because they didn't want to see the pictures all over television, and they knew they eventually would leak," said a former agency official who took part in the discussions before the tapes were pulverized. The presence of the tapes in Bangkok and the CIA's communications with the station chief there were described by current and former officials.
Congressional investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration openly advocated the tapes' destruction, according to officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to Capitol Hill. "It was an agency decision - you can take it to the bank," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday. "Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong."
Many of those involved recalled conversations in which senior CIA and White House officials advised against destroying the tapes, but without expressly prohibiting it, leaving an odd vacuum of specific instructions on a such a politically sensitive matter. They said that Rodriguez then interpreted this silence - the absence of a decision to order the tapes' preservation - as a tacit approval of their destruction.
"Jose could not get any specific direction out of his leadership" in 2005, one senior official said. Word of the resulting destruction, one former official said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately, by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed on exchanges between the two men.
"Frankly, there were more important issues that needed to be focused on, such as trying to preserve a critical [interrogation] program and salvage relationships that had been damaged because of the leaks" about the existence of the secret prisons, said a former agency official familiar with Goss' position at the time.
Rodriguez, whom the CIA honored with a medal in August for "Extraordinary Fidelity and Essential Service," declined requests for an interview. But his attorney said he acted in the belief that he was carrying out the agency's stated intention for nearly three years. "Since 2002, the CIA wanted to destroy the tapes to protect the identity and lives of its officers and for other counterintelligence reasons," Bennett said in a written response to questions from the Washington Post.
"In 2003 the leadership of intelligence committees were told about the CIA's intent to destroy the tapes. In 2005, CIA lawyers again advised the National Clandestine Service that they had the authority to destroy the tapes and it was legal to do so. It is unfortunate," Bennett continued, "that under the pressure of a Congressional and criminal investigation, history is now being revised, and some people are running for cover."
Recorded on the tapes was the coercive questioning of two senior al-Qaeda suspects: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida,and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were captured by U.S. forces in 2002. They show Zubaida undergoing waterboarding, which involved strapping him to a board and pouring water over his nose and mouth, creating the sensation of imminent drowning. Nashiri later also underwent the same treatment.
Some CIA officials say the agency's use of waterboarding helped extract information that led to the capture of other key al-Qaeda members and prevented attacks. But others, including former CIA, FBI and military officials, say the practice constitutes torture.
The destruction of the tapes was not the first occasion in which Rodriguez got in trouble for taking a provocative action to help a colleague. While serving as the CIA's Latin America division chief in 1996, he appealed to local Dominican Republic authorities to prevent a childhood friend, and CIA contractor, who had been arrested in a drug investigation, from being beaten up, according to a former CIA official familiar with the episode.
Such an intervention was forbidden by CIA rules, and so Rodriguez was stripped of his management post and reprimanded in an inspector general's report. Shortly after the reprimand, he was named station chief in Mexico City, Mexico, and, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was promoted to deputy director of the fast-expanding counterterrorism center. He served under the center's director then, J. Cofer Black, who had been his subordinate in the Latin America division.
When Black - who played a key role in setting up the secret prisons and instituting the interrogation policy - left the CIA in December 2002, Rodriguez took his place. Colleagues recall that even in the deputy's slot, Rodriguez was aware of the videotaping of Zubaida, and that he later told several it was necessary so that experts, such as psychologists not present during interrogations, could view Zubaida's physical reactions to questions.
By December 2002, the taping was no longer needed, according to three former intelligence officials. "Zubaida's health was better, and he was providing information that we could check out," one said.
An internal probe of the interrogations by the CIA's inspector general began in early 2003 for reasons that have not been disclosed. In February of that year, then-CIA General Counsel Scott W. Muller told lawmakers that the agency planned to destroy the tapes after the completion of the investigation. That year, all waterboarding was halted; and at an undisclosed time, several of the inspector general's deputies traveled to Bangkok to view the tapes, officials said.
In May 2004, CIA operatives became concerned when a Washington Post article disclosed that the CIA had conducted its interrogations under a new, looser Bush administration definition of what legally constituted torture, several former CIA officials said. The disclosure sparked an internal Justice Department review of that definition and led to a suspension of the CIA's harsh interrogation program.
The tapes were discussed with White House lawyers twice, according to a senior U.S. official. The first occasion was a meeting convened by Muller and senior lawyers of the White House and the Justice Department specifically to discuss their fate. The other discussion was described by one participant as "fleeting," when the existence of the tapes came up during a spring 2004 meeting to discuss the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, said the official.
Those known to have counseled against the tapes' destruction include John B. Bellinger III, while serving as the national Security Council's top legal adviser; Harriet E. Miers, while serving as the top White House counsel; George J. Tenet, while serving as CIA director; Muller, while serving as the CIA's general counsel; and John D. Negroponte, while serving as director of national intelligence.
Hayden, in an interview, said the advice expressed by administration lawyers was consistent. "To the degree this was discussed outside the agency, everyone counseled caution," he said. But he said that, in 2005, it was "the agency's view that there were no legal impediments" to the tapes' destruction. There also was "genuine concern about agency people being identified," were the tapes ever to be made public.
Hayden, who became CIA director last year, acknowledged that the questions raised about the tapes' destruction, then and now, are legitimate. "One can ask if it was a good idea, or if there was a better way to do it," he said. "We are very happy to let the facts take us where they will."
Intellpuke: You can read this article by Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, reporting from from Washington, D.C., in context here: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR2008011504090.html?hpid=topnews
Washington Post staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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Friday, January 11, 2008
South Carolina connection to OUR HEALTH CARE Disaster
Darla Moore, the toughest BABE in the business,,,,well dig deep into who she is married to and just follow the money. Keep in mind, Richard Rainwater was one of the 'Founding DIRECTORS' of the health care system in this country as we know it. You know, the FRIST famil and good ol boys......HCA!!!
In August, Morgan Stanley Real Estate bought Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. for $6.5 billion.
(PLEASE!!!)
6.5 BIllion dollars ......hmmm. Wonder how much of that really is stolen from our health care system?
Posted on Wed, Jan. 09, 2008reprint or license print email Digg it del.icio.us AIM
Group of investors buys Mira Vista Golf Club
By SANDRA BAKER
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
FORT WORTH -- The exclusive Mira Vista Golf Club in southwest Fort Worth has been sold to a group of five investors with longtime ties to its former owner, including one who has been involved in the club's management since it opened more than 20 years ago.
The move prompted complaints from some residents of the surrounding golfing-community development that they were not given a chance to make the club a member-owned operation.
The five investors bought the 700-member club, located south of Interstate 20 and west of Bryant Irvin Road, under the names MV Club Llc. and Mira Vista Ventures from Crescent Real Estate Equities Limited Partnership, the Fort Worth-based affiliate of Morgan Stanley. In August, Morgan Stanley Real Estate bought Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. for $6.5 billion.
Marie Ali, a vice president at Morgan Stanley's headquarters in New York, declined to comment on the golf-club deal, which closed in late December.
The investors are Tom Nezworski, the club's senior vice president who has been with Mira Vista for 15 years; Lindy Ray Miller, who was there at the start of the club and who serves as director of golfing operations; and Bruce Picker, who oversees the club's day-to-day operations and served for about a decade as Crescent's treasurer and chief investment officer.
Also included are James Bartlett of Paradise Valley, Ariz., and Nick Hackstock of Englewood, Colo., both former real estate consultants to Richard Rainwater, who acquired Mira Vista from the Resolution Trust Corp. in 1992.
Nezworski said Morgan Stanley approached the group last fall about selling the golf club, and they put it under contract in October.
He acknowledged that there were some members who were disappointed that they weren't given the opportunity to buy the club to make it a member-owned organization.
"They wanted to find someone to close it quickly," Nezworski said. "We bought it without any reservation."
Morgan Stanley bought Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. for its office portfolio. Most of Crescent's luxury resorts and business-class hotels were sold to Chicago-based Walton Street Capital. Mira Vista was not included in that deal.
Mira Vista opened in 1987 on 570 acres, with the golf course and its facilities taking in about 180 acres. It was a joint development of Jerry Thomas and Metropolitan Savings & Loan Association of Dallas. The development was taken over by the RTC in 1990 when Metropolitan Savings & Loan failed.
Two years after buying it, Rainwater used the development in the founding of Crescent.
In 2004, the last 15 resi- dential lots in the development were sold. With more than 500 houses built, Mira Vista will have 700 when completed.
Nezworski said the transition to the new ownership has been "seamless and transparent" and that there have been no changes to membership benefits or the staff of 95 employees.
SANDRA BAKER, 817-390-7727
sabaker@star-telegram.com
In August, Morgan Stanley Real Estate bought Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. for $6.5 billion.
(PLEASE!!!)
6.5 BIllion dollars ......hmmm. Wonder how much of that really is stolen from our health care system?
Posted on Wed, Jan. 09, 2008reprint or license print email Digg it del.icio.us AIM
Group of investors buys Mira Vista Golf Club
By SANDRA BAKER
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
FORT WORTH -- The exclusive Mira Vista Golf Club in southwest Fort Worth has been sold to a group of five investors with longtime ties to its former owner, including one who has been involved in the club's management since it opened more than 20 years ago.
The move prompted complaints from some residents of the surrounding golfing-community development that they were not given a chance to make the club a member-owned operation.
The five investors bought the 700-member club, located south of Interstate 20 and west of Bryant Irvin Road, under the names MV Club Llc. and Mira Vista Ventures from Crescent Real Estate Equities Limited Partnership, the Fort Worth-based affiliate of Morgan Stanley. In August, Morgan Stanley Real Estate bought Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. for $6.5 billion.
Marie Ali, a vice president at Morgan Stanley's headquarters in New York, declined to comment on the golf-club deal, which closed in late December.
The investors are Tom Nezworski, the club's senior vice president who has been with Mira Vista for 15 years; Lindy Ray Miller, who was there at the start of the club and who serves as director of golfing operations; and Bruce Picker, who oversees the club's day-to-day operations and served for about a decade as Crescent's treasurer and chief investment officer.
Also included are James Bartlett of Paradise Valley, Ariz., and Nick Hackstock of Englewood, Colo., both former real estate consultants to Richard Rainwater, who acquired Mira Vista from the Resolution Trust Corp. in 1992.
Nezworski said Morgan Stanley approached the group last fall about selling the golf club, and they put it under contract in October.
He acknowledged that there were some members who were disappointed that they weren't given the opportunity to buy the club to make it a member-owned organization.
"They wanted to find someone to close it quickly," Nezworski said. "We bought it without any reservation."
Morgan Stanley bought Crescent Real Estate Equities Co. for its office portfolio. Most of Crescent's luxury resorts and business-class hotels were sold to Chicago-based Walton Street Capital. Mira Vista was not included in that deal.
Mira Vista opened in 1987 on 570 acres, with the golf course and its facilities taking in about 180 acres. It was a joint development of Jerry Thomas and Metropolitan Savings & Loan Association of Dallas. The development was taken over by the RTC in 1990 when Metropolitan Savings & Loan failed.
Two years after buying it, Rainwater used the development in the founding of Crescent.
In 2004, the last 15 resi- dential lots in the development were sold. With more than 500 houses built, Mira Vista will have 700 when completed.
Nezworski said the transition to the new ownership has been "seamless and transparent" and that there have been no changes to membership benefits or the staff of 95 employees.
SANDRA BAKER, 817-390-7727
sabaker@star-telegram.com
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Supreme Court ..Thurston....MORE GVT FRAUD
Published : Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:02
By : Agencies
BOSTON (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ordered the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its decision to impose a three-year home-confinement term on a former health care executive convicted of fraud.
Two federal judges sentenced William Thurston, who was senior vice president of Damon Clinical Testing Laboratories Inc., to three months of home confinement followed by three months of probation in 2002, but the appeals court twice tossed out the sentences as too lenient.
In December, the Supreme Court ruled judges have the freedom to hand out prison terms that don't match sentencing guidelines, and on Monday the justices sent Thurston's case back to the appeals court based on that ruling.
Thurston's attorney, Matthew D. Brown of San Francisco, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Thurston was convicted in federal court in December 2001 of one count of conspiring to defraud Medicare in a scheme that involved deceiving doctors into ordering unnecessary blood tests. Damon, which was based in Needham at the time, was ordered to pay $119 million in penalties in October 1996 for the fraud scheme.
Thurston was originally sentenced to serve the three months of home confinement, but in August 2003, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the sentence was too lenient and sentenced him to the statutory maximum of five years in prison.
In January 2005, the Supreme Court ruled defendants' Sixth Amendment rights to a jury trial were violated because 18-year-old sentencing guidelines required judges to make factual decisions that affect prison time.
The Supreme Court then asked federal courts to review more than 400 appeals from defendants, including Thurston, who claimed they received overly harsh sentences under guidelines the court declared unconstitutional.
In 2006, the appeals court reviewed the case and ordered Thurston to be sentenced to no less than three years in prison.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
By : Agencies
BOSTON (AP) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ordered the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals to take another look at its decision to impose a three-year home-confinement term on a former health care executive convicted of fraud.
Two federal judges sentenced William Thurston, who was senior vice president of Damon Clinical Testing Laboratories Inc., to three months of home confinement followed by three months of probation in 2002, but the appeals court twice tossed out the sentences as too lenient.
In December, the Supreme Court ruled judges have the freedom to hand out prison terms that don't match sentencing guidelines, and on Monday the justices sent Thurston's case back to the appeals court based on that ruling.
Thurston's attorney, Matthew D. Brown of San Francisco, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
Thurston was convicted in federal court in December 2001 of one count of conspiring to defraud Medicare in a scheme that involved deceiving doctors into ordering unnecessary blood tests. Damon, which was based in Needham at the time, was ordered to pay $119 million in penalties in October 1996 for the fraud scheme.
Thurston was originally sentenced to serve the three months of home confinement, but in August 2003, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the sentence was too lenient and sentenced him to the statutory maximum of five years in prison.
In January 2005, the Supreme Court ruled defendants' Sixth Amendment rights to a jury trial were violated because 18-year-old sentencing guidelines required judges to make factual decisions that affect prison time.
The Supreme Court then asked federal courts to review more than 400 appeals from defendants, including Thurston, who claimed they received overly harsh sentences under guidelines the court declared unconstitutional.
In 2006, the appeals court reviewed the case and ordered Thurston to be sentenced to no less than three years in prison.
Copyright 2007 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Monday, January 7, 2008
CHEAP GAS PRICES ? Get a grip......
NOT HERE!!!
Take a look at these contributions and guess why YOUR GAS PRICE is RISING,,,,,DAILY!
Or price, cost and most importantly of all.....CHOICE for media....CABLE EXCLUSIVELY!!
Amount Donor Employer Interest Category Home
$175,000 Dennis R. Berman Denitech Corp. Miscellaneous Business Irving
$146,000 Louis A. Beecherl Jr Beecherl Investments Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$141,000 Tom Loeffler Arter & Hadden Lawyers & Lobbyists San Antonio
$135,000 Phil Adams Phil Adams Co. Insurance Bryan
$129,500 George C. Hixon Hixon Properties, Inc. Real Estate San Antonio
$128,500 Peter O'Donnell Jr 1st Nat'l Bank of Dallas Finance Dallas
$125,000 Lonnie A. Pilgrim Pilgrim's Pride Agriculture Pittsburg
$124,449 Richard W. Heath BeautiControl Cosmetics Miscellaneous Business Dallas
$120,000 Robert C. McNair Cogen Technologies Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$119,409 Richard D. Kinder Kinder Morgan Energy Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$115,000 Donald Carter Home Interiors & Gifts Miscellaneous Business Dallas
$111,773 Charles J. Wyly Jr Sterling Software Communications/Electronics Dallas
$105,000 David H. Dewhurst Falcon Seaboard Oil Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$105,000 Ray L. Hunt Hunt Oil Co. Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$104,000 Drayton McLane Jr McLane Co. Miscellaneous Business Temple
$103,000 John T. Amend Amend Group Real Estate Dallas
$102,500 Walt Neuls Colonial Casualty Ins. Insurance Plano
$101,000 A. R. Sanchez Jr Sanchez Oil and Gas Energy/Nat'l Resources Laredo
$100,000 William McMinn Sterling Group Energy/Nat'l Resources Brenham
$100,000 Frederick R. Meyer Aladdin Industries Miscellaneous Business Dallas
$100,000 Kenneth Lay Enron Corp. Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$100,000 Richard E. Rainwater Rainwater, Inc. Finance Fort Worth
$100,000 William L. Hutchison Hutchison Energy, Ltd. Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$99,200 N. E. Crain Shop Online Communications/Electronics Dallas
$98,500 Sam Wyly Sterling Software Communications/Electronics Dallas
$95,000 Edward O. Gaylord Gaylord & Co. Communications/Electronics Houston
$95,000 Thomas O. Hicks Hicks Muse Tate & Furst Finance Dallas
$90,000 David W. Hickson CIC Corp ?? College Station
$90,000 Harold Simmons Contran Corp; Valhi Corp. Finance Dallas
$90,000 Glenn S. Collins NeoDyne Technologies Communications/Electronics College Station
$89,436 Warren W. Tichenor W W Tichenor & Co Communications/Electronics San Antonio
$86,000 Albert D. Huddleston Hyperion Resources, Inc. Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$86,000 Robert J. Wright Medical Cities, Inc. Health Dallas
$85,000 J. Virgil Waggoner Sterling Chemical Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$85,000 Henry J. Smith Clarke/Bardes, Inc. Insurance Dallas
$85,000 Gary G. Jacobs Laredo National Bank Finance Laredo
$85,000 Bradford Freeman Freeman Spogli & Co Finance L.A., CA
$79,750 James R. Leininger Kinetic Concepts, Inc. Health San Antonio
$70,000 Mark E. Watson Jr Titan Holdings, Inc. Insurance San Antonio
$70,000 Forrest Hoglund Enron Oil & Gas Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$4,170,017
Take a look at these contributions and guess why YOUR GAS PRICE is RISING,,,,,DAILY!
Or price, cost and most importantly of all.....CHOICE for media....CABLE EXCLUSIVELY!!
Amount Donor Employer Interest Category Home
$175,000 Dennis R. Berman Denitech Corp. Miscellaneous Business Irving
$146,000 Louis A. Beecherl Jr Beecherl Investments Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$141,000 Tom Loeffler Arter & Hadden Lawyers & Lobbyists San Antonio
$135,000 Phil Adams Phil Adams Co. Insurance Bryan
$129,500 George C. Hixon Hixon Properties, Inc. Real Estate San Antonio
$128,500 Peter O'Donnell Jr 1st Nat'l Bank of Dallas Finance Dallas
$125,000 Lonnie A. Pilgrim Pilgrim's Pride Agriculture Pittsburg
$124,449 Richard W. Heath BeautiControl Cosmetics Miscellaneous Business Dallas
$120,000 Robert C. McNair Cogen Technologies Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$119,409 Richard D. Kinder Kinder Morgan Energy Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$115,000 Donald Carter Home Interiors & Gifts Miscellaneous Business Dallas
$111,773 Charles J. Wyly Jr Sterling Software Communications/Electronics Dallas
$105,000 David H. Dewhurst Falcon Seaboard Oil Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$105,000 Ray L. Hunt Hunt Oil Co. Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$104,000 Drayton McLane Jr McLane Co. Miscellaneous Business Temple
$103,000 John T. Amend Amend Group Real Estate Dallas
$102,500 Walt Neuls Colonial Casualty Ins. Insurance Plano
$101,000 A. R. Sanchez Jr Sanchez Oil and Gas Energy/Nat'l Resources Laredo
$100,000 William McMinn Sterling Group Energy/Nat'l Resources Brenham
$100,000 Frederick R. Meyer Aladdin Industries Miscellaneous Business Dallas
$100,000 Kenneth Lay Enron Corp. Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$100,000 Richard E. Rainwater Rainwater, Inc. Finance Fort Worth
$100,000 William L. Hutchison Hutchison Energy, Ltd. Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$99,200 N. E. Crain Shop Online Communications/Electronics Dallas
$98,500 Sam Wyly Sterling Software Communications/Electronics Dallas
$95,000 Edward O. Gaylord Gaylord & Co. Communications/Electronics Houston
$95,000 Thomas O. Hicks Hicks Muse Tate & Furst Finance Dallas
$90,000 David W. Hickson CIC Corp ?? College Station
$90,000 Harold Simmons Contran Corp; Valhi Corp. Finance Dallas
$90,000 Glenn S. Collins NeoDyne Technologies Communications/Electronics College Station
$89,436 Warren W. Tichenor W W Tichenor & Co Communications/Electronics San Antonio
$86,000 Albert D. Huddleston Hyperion Resources, Inc. Energy/Nat'l Resources Dallas
$86,000 Robert J. Wright Medical Cities, Inc. Health Dallas
$85,000 J. Virgil Waggoner Sterling Chemical Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$85,000 Henry J. Smith Clarke/Bardes, Inc. Insurance Dallas
$85,000 Gary G. Jacobs Laredo National Bank Finance Laredo
$85,000 Bradford Freeman Freeman Spogli & Co Finance L.A., CA
$79,750 James R. Leininger Kinetic Concepts, Inc. Health San Antonio
$70,000 Mark E. Watson Jr Titan Holdings, Inc. Insurance San Antonio
$70,000 Forrest Hoglund Enron Oil & Gas Energy/Nat'l Resources Houston
$4,170,017
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