Jeb Bush Got $1.3M Job At Lehman After Florida Shifted Pension Cash To Bank
International Business Times, August 19, 2015
Republican presidential candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush speaks during an Americans for Prosperity event in New Hampshire, on July 22, 2015. Reuters/Dominick Reuter (via IB Times)
But for Jeb Bush personally, his enduring relationship with Lehman would prove lucrative. In 2007, just as he left office, Bush secured a job as a Lehman consultant for $1.3 million a year, Bloomberg reported.
Weeks after Bush took the Lehman job, the Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) -- a three-member body that makes investment decisions about state pension funds and whose ranks had recently included one Jeb Bush -- gave Lehman additional business: SBA purchased $842 million worth of separate investments in Lehman’s mortgage-backed securities. Over the course of the year, the SBA would shift an additional $420 million of pension money into the same fund in which the state had begun investing under Bush.
In short, during Bush’s first year working for Lehman, his former colleagues in Tallahassee, the state capital, moved vast sums of Florida pension money into the doomed Wall Street investment bank, even as warnings about its financial troubles began to emerge.
These days, Jeb Bush is seeking the Republican nomination for president, and in so doing, he presents himself as a champion of the public interest in the face of a corrupted system exploited by insiders who enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. But an International Business Times investigation of Bush’s role in helping steer state investment to Lehman and his subsequent employment with the firm challenges that depiction, raising the prospect that Bush may have personally profited from choices his administration made that benefited the bank.
Former government officials and ethics experts interviewed by IBTimes say the sequence of transactions raises significant questions.
There is much more information in this article.
Hello, M$M?
How's about chasing down Jeb Bush for some public answers to this? He's on the run from so many of his dealings while he occupied the Florida governor's office. "Take the money and run" is Jeb Bush's motto.
He stole from the people of Florida.
Come on, M$M. You can do it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
By Andrew Perez, David Sirota, Matthew Cunningham-Cook
International Business Times, April 14 2015 10:40 AM EDT
Four years before the financial collapse, Goldman Sachs executive George Herbert Walker IV had much to be thankful for. "I've been fortunate to be a small part of teams leading U.S. restructurings, European privatizations, global pension management and now hedge fund and private equity investing,” he said in the annual report of a banking colossus that would soon be known as the “great vampire squid” of Wall Street.
“The world,” said Walker, “just keeps getting more interesting."
As the head of Goldman Sachs’ alternative investment unit, Walker’s ebullience was understandable. At the same time he was raising $100,000 for his cousin George W. Bush’s successful presidential re-election effort, the administration of another cousin, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, returned the family favor, delivering $150 million of Florida pension money to an alternative investment fund run by Walker’s firm. Like other executives whose companies received Florida pension money, Walker is now renewing the cycle, reportedly attending in February a high-dollar fundraiser for Jeb Bush’s political committee.
Walker is not alone: He is one of 19 top fundraisers for George W. Bush -- known as “Pioneers” and “Rangers” -- whose financial firms received state business from Jeb Bush’s administration in Tallahassee. In all, an International Business Times’ review of government documents shows Jeb Bush oversaw Florida directing at least $1.7 billion of state workers’ retirement money to the financial firms of his elder brother’s major donors.
As Jeb Bush oversaw the State Board of Administration (SBA) that runs Florida’s massive public pension system, the state shifted billions of dollars into higher-risk, higher-fee alternative investments, benefiting the same sector of the investment industry he would work in upon leaving office. Many of those state deals delivered returns that fell short of projections. Roughly 20 percent of that system’s 53 private investment deals during Bush’s governorship went to companies that employed his brother’s Pioneers. Those financial firms, in turn, delivered more than $5 million of campaign cash to George W. Bush, the Republican National Committee and Jeb Bush’s Republican Party of Florida. (Click here to see the full list of Bush Pioneers whose firms received Florida pension investments from Jeb Bush’s administration).
CONTINUED...
http://www.ibtimes.com/jeb-bushs-administration-steered-florida-pension-money-george-w-bushs-fundraisers-1880592
UBS?
I see what you did there.
Carry on.
The editors would never allow it to be printed because it might offend some of their other rich clients who made money by cheating the 99%. Can't risk offending Wall St. and the banks, now can they?
