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Jeb Bush Profited From Firms He Favored In Office
Nov 9, 2015 | WND
By Jerome R. Corsi
...Examining Jeb Bush’s relationship with former Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers, Schweizer documented that Lehman won lucrative contracts with Florida while Bush was governor. Lehman, for example, was appointed as broker for a $139 million bond offering to fund Miami International Airport’s...
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Jeb Bush
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Jeb Bush Profited From Firms He Favored In Office
Nov 9, 2015 | WND
By Jerome R. Corsi
...After leaving office in January 2007, Bush was greatly benefited by Lehman Brothers/Barclays, Tenet Healthcare, Rayonier and education companies run by Bush friend Randy Best, Schweizer said.
“Some granted him lucrative consulting contracts or gave him board memberships and lucrative stock options in the years immediately following his departure from the governor’s mansion.”
...Lehman Brothers rewards
Examining Jeb Bush’s relationship with former Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers, Schweizer documented that Lehman won lucrative contracts with Florida while Bush was governor.
Lehman, for example, was appointed as broker for a $139 million bond offering to fund Miami International Airport’s Capital Improvement Program. Lehman also was appointed a co-senior manager for the underwriting syndicate for the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Corporation, a fund set up by the state to provide insurance in the event of a hurricane or other natural disaster.
While Bush sat on a three-member board that oversaw the State Board of Administration fund managing billions of dollars in investment for some 1,000 Florida school districts, towns and local agencies, Lehman won the contract to manage the SBA funds that reached a peak of nearly $150 billion during his gubernatorial tenure.
In 2007, the SBA bought a total of $1.4 billion in mortgage-backed securities from a Lehman-led group in an investment that turned out to be a disaster for the state when the sub-prime real estate market collapsed in 2008.
The timing of the purchase, Schweizer writes, raised “serious questions about what role, if any, Jeb Bush played in their purchase.”
Schweizer notes that a month after Jeb left the governor’s mansion, in January 2007, he established a consulting firm called Jeb Bush and Associates that was awarded subsequently a contract with Lehman Brothers worth $1 million a year.
The sum, Schweizer comments, was “extremely high pay even for an ex-politicians.” Lehman Brothers paid about half that sum to former Ohio congressman and current Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who served as chairman of the powerful U.S. Congressional Budget Committee and is now running for the GOP presidential nomination.
Lehman hired Bush in August 2007, Schweizer writes, noting that in July and August 2007, Lehman sold the state of Florida $842 million in mortgage-backed securities, the beginning of what ultimately totaled nearly $1.3 billion.
“These highly risky investments were already controversial in 2007 and played an enormous role in the 2008 financial crisis,” he continued. “When word spread that the SBA had purchased a risky investment, panic set in as local governments and school districts tried to withdraw their funds.”
Schweizer stressed that investors like the Jefferson County School District in Florida, which kept nearly $4 million in cash in the Lehman-managed fund, “were left struggling to cover basic administrative costs.”
By December 2007, the SBA had to freeze accounts temporarily to prevent a run on the account. As the mortgage-backed securities market continued to tank into 2008, Florida faced a billion dollar loss.
“During this curious timing, both Jeb Bush and Lehman deny there was any connection between Jeb Bush’s hiring and Lehman’s sale of mortgage-backed securities to Florida,” Schweizer writes.
Highly lucrative deals
The other three case studies follow a similar pattern.
Schweizer chronicled how Bush as governor assisted Florida health care giant Tenet Healthcare with managing the 15 hospitals the group had operated in Florida since 2005. Bush implemented a Medicare Reform pilot program that benefited Tenet Healthcare directly by increasing much needed Medicare reimbursements and relieving pressure from the U.S. Department of Justice under President George W. Bush and the Florida attorney general, which were suing Tenet for “improperly assigning diagnosis codes for some hospital stays to get higher Medicare reimbursements.”
The pilot program allowed Bush as Florida governor to create a Low Income Pool LIP, designed to reimburse hospitals for the cost for uncompensated care to managed care plans, instead of the previous model of reimbursement through traditional fee-for-service programs, resulting in granting up to $1 billion in funds to Florida hospitals for uncompensated care. It was a nearly $300 million increase from what had been previously allocated.
Three months after he left office, Bush joined the board of Tenet Healthcare, then the largest publicly traded hospital company in the United States, owning at that time 12 hospitals in South Florida.
“Jeb’s deal with Tenet was highly lucrative,” Schweizer comments. “As in the case of Lehman, his compensation package was substantially higher than that of his peers. Indeed, his pay and stock options for the first year were more than those of any of the eight other non-Tenet employee directors received.”...
For full story: http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/jeb-bush-profited-from-firms-he-favored-in-office/
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