Jeb Bush Got $1.3M Job At Lehman After Florida Shifted Pension Cash To Bank [View all]

[seafan]

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)

For Florida taxpayers, the move by the administration of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to forge a relationship with Lehman Brothers would ultimately prove disastrous. Transactions in 2005 and 2006 put the Wall Street investment bank in charge of some $250 million worth of pension funds for Florida cops, teachers and firefighters. Lehman would capture more than $5 million in fees on these deals, while gaining additional contracts to manage another $1.2 billion of Florida's money. Then, in the fall of 2008, Lehman collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving Florida facing up to $1 billion in losses.

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.

Bush’s presidential campaign declined to answer IBTimes questions about state investments that Lehman made while he was governor and soon afterward, while he was working for the bank. He has denied having anything to do with the 2007 transactions, according to a Tampa Bay Times review of the state’s investments in Lehman after Bush left office.

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.