Wednesday, March 10, 2004

So you think Martha should be jailed?

Well, if it's against the law to dump stocks for a profit ($228,000) on insider trading, then, I suppose that's a legal sentence.

How about applying that to everyone who does the same thing?

For instance, how about His Slowliness the Dope?

The year 1986 was very good for George W. Bush.

After a decade of striking Texas brown dust instead of oil, his luck finally turned that year when go-for-broke Harken Energy Corp. bought his failing oil exploration firm for stock. Four years later the company concealed large losses just before the GOP presidential hopeful unloaded those securities for a nice profit [$848,560]...

...Bush’s sale of the Harken stock in 1990 attracted the attention of regulators and the national media because he was tardy in filing the required public disclosure, and because the trade came shortly before the company reported for the first time that it was incurring huge losses.

...Public records give no precise amount of how much he earned on the Advance stock sale, but Bush’s financial disclosure form made public last year shows that he realized a capital gain, or profit, of as much as $1 million on the sale. Asked how much the Texas governor paid for the stock and how much he profited from the sale, spokesman Scott McClellan referred all questions to the manager of Bush’s blind trust, Robert McCleskey. McCleskey declined to discuss his client’s investment in the Advance stock. He said that under the terms of the Texas blind trust—a legal requirement for the governor but less rigorous than the blind trust that applies to federal executive branch officers—he cannot tell even Bush how much profit he made on the sale.
  article

Huh?

The SEC’s division of enforcement launched a probe of Bush’s sale of his Harken stock the day after the Wall Street Journal on April 4, 1991, reported that he had been eight months late in filing the required insider-trading form with the regulators. This investigation was separate from the earlier division of corporation finance probe that resulted in Harken’s recasting its 1989 balance sheet.

SEC enforcement investigators focused on whether Bush dumped his stock on June 22, 1990, because he knew that the company’s second-quarter report, announced on Aug. 20, would show a $23.2 million loss and depress the stock.


"Lucky for Bush, his father was president at the time, the head of the SEC was his father's appointee and former vice presidential counsel, and the SEC's general counsel was Bush's personal lawyer in his sale of the Texas Rangers." -- Kim Harrington, letter to the editor, Boston.com


Lucky.

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