Reply #14: BWC tried to keep $215M loss under wraps prior to '04 vote

[Melissa G]

Thanks to rosebud57 for the post and the DU discussion here..
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x445910
Toledo Blade reports on '04 machinations to save Bush, Voinovich, etc.


BWC tried to keep $215M loss under wraps prior to '04 vote
Documents reflect director's concern about possible 'leak'

COLUMBUS - Less than a week before the 2004 presidential election, Jim Conrad, then head of the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, took steps to ensure that a $215 million investment loss in an offshore hedge-fund would not become public, documents obtained by The Blade show.

On Oct. 27, 2004 - just six days before President Bush was re-elected after narrowly winning Ohio - Mr. Conrad expressed his concern about a potential "leak" of the losses in an e-mail to John Annarino, then the bureau's chief legal counsel and ethics officer. In the e-mail, Mr. Conrad advised how Mr. Annarino and James McLean, then the bureau's investment director, should manage the agency's investment staff to keep the potentially explosive losses under wraps.<snip>

On Sept. 27, 2004, Mr. Conrad, the bureau's administrator-CEO, was giving a speech in Cincinnati when he received a call from Ms. Kielmeyer, then the bureau's chief operating officer. She told Mr. Conrad that an employee had told her about an investment gone bad. That evening, Mr. McLean told Mr. Conrad in a conference call that when he wanted to "tighten the screws" on MDL, Gasper had told him that Mr. Conrad had given permission to "give MDL a break.''<snip> Mr. McLean said he was instructed by Mr. Annarino "to make sure that the staff was kept content and happy so that they would not reveal any information on MDL."<snip> "Keeping a lid on the MDL losses was not something that I simply assumed Mr. Annarino wanted; it was a straightforward mandate," Mr. McLean wrote. "The Bureau did not want any information on MDL to get out and I was to cooperate with that mandate."<snip>

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060813/NEWS24/608130338/-1/NEWS