What's he gonna talk about?
How to garner billion dollar loans from saudis when your businesses FAIL?
Indicted Saudi investor in Harken Energy gets $80 million Pentagon contract
by smintheus
Sat Jun 07, 2008 at 07:00:05 PM PDT
Gretchen Peters reports that the Pentagon has awarded an international fugitive, shadowy Saudi financier Gaith Pharaon, an $80 million contract to supply jet fuel in Afghanistan (h/t Ron Beasley). Pharaon is a fugitive from the FBI as well as the subject of investigations by France and Italy
www.dailykos.com$80-million-Pentagon-contract
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Or how to gain investors for your failed businesses through your daddy's friends?
And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having "earned" a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest day's work in his life.
Let's retell that story as briefly as we can. Bush started an oil company called Arbusto in the late 1970s. He was driving it into the ground when, in 1982, he was rescued by Philip Uzielli, a Princeton crony of his dad's troubleshooter James Baker. Uzielli invested a million dollars in Arbusto, which was then worth less than $500,000. In return, he got 10 percent interest in the company. No, that's not a misprint. Mismatches between equity and ownershipalways in Dubya's favorare a hallmark of our President's financial rise.
Even after Uzielli's turbocharging, Arbusto was going under. Before it did, it "merged" with a company called Spectrum 7, which took on Bush as head executive. As that company, too, nose-dived, Harken Energy proved unaccountably eager to "merge" with it. It offered a half-million dollars in stock and $120,000 a year to get the Vice President's son on the board. It also "loaned" Bush hundreds of thousands of dollars below prime rate.
Weeks after his father was elected president, Bush got involved in the purchase of the Texas Rangers. He would eventually sell his Harken shares to cover the loan that allowed him to help buy the team. He put up under 2 percent of the purchase price ($606,000 out of $46 million), but the deal called for him to be given almost 12 percent of the stock, once the other partners cleared their initial investments. Generous of them! In 1998 Bush sold his stake in the teampumped up by a $135-million publicly-financed-but-
privately-owned stadium, bestowed as a gift from the taxpayers of Arlington, TXfor $15 million.
www.nypress.com
