Know Bush Fact #6

,Based on the belief that the truth shall set you free:



Harken Energy, a small oil company with no previous experience in international or offshore drilling, won a 35-year exploration contract with the emirate of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf in 1989. Odd, since this small company had no previous experience in international or offshore drilling. But it did have George Bush as a Director and major stockholder since 1986, when Harken bought another one of his many money-losing ventures, Spectrum 7 Oil.

"His name was George Bush," said Harken's founder, Phil Hendrick. "That was worth the money."

But not really. Harken soon began to lose money, too, but with the help of its accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, the shareholders were kept unaware of the losses because of a sale (on paper) of a Harken subsidiary to another division of Harken, with a cooked-up loan to and from itself, resulting in non-existent profits being posted.

The subsidiary sale was declared bogus by the SEC, but before a corrected profit-and-loss statement was released, Bush dumped $848,560.00 worth of Harken stock. With that money, Bush was able to buy into the Texas Rangers baseball team, and eventually earned $16 million from its sale because of the financial bonuses written into the contract by James Doty, his personal lawyer.

Meanwhile the Harken stock collapsed.

An investigation by the SEC ensued in 1991 when it was discovered that Bush had not, as required, reported his sale of the stocks until 8 months after the federal deadline. But by then, that same James Doty, Bush's lawyer, was the SEC's General Counsel, in charge of any litigation the commission would initiate, and President George H.W. Bush (I) had appointed old family friend and former economic advisor Richard Breeden to the position of Chairman of the SEC.

The investigation was dropped.

When Bush ran for governor of Texas in 1994, he repeatedly told reporters he had been "exonerated" by the SEC, as did his Press Secretary Ari Fleischer in 2002. But while the SEC officially said "there was no case there," a letter to Bush announcing the agency's decision stated that the end of the probe "must in no way be construed as indicating that the party has been exonerated."

To verify this information and learn more, Google "Doty +Breeden +Harken".

- February 13, 2004