Obama’s Investments Raises Eyebrows
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Elections, Money
This is just the type of thing that doesn’t look very good for the squeaky clean image of the junior Senator from Illinois. But is it that bad?
Less than two months after ascending to the United States Senate, Barack Obama bought more than $50,000 worth of stock in two speculative companies whose major investors included some of his biggest political donors.One of the companies was a biotech concern that was starting to develop a drug to treat avian flu. In March 2005, two weeks after buying about $5,000 of its shares, Mr. Obama took the lead in a legislative push for more federal spending to battle the disease.
The most recent financial disclosure form for Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat, also shows that he bought more than $50,000 in stock in a satellite communications business whose principal backers include four friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.
However, it doesn’t look like Obama even knew his broker had invested in the companies. Looks like he should a) maybe find a new broker or b) keep better track of his investments. Probably both.
Here’s more…
A spokesman for Mr. Obama, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2008, said yesterday that the senator did not know that he had invested in either company until fall 2005, when he learned of it and decided to sell the stocks. He sold them at a net loss of $13,000.The spokesman, Bill Burton, said Mr. Obama’s broker bought the stocks without consulting the senator, under the terms of a blind trust that was being set up for the senator at that time but was not finalized until several months after the investments were made.
“He went about this process to avoid an actual or apparent conflict of interest, and he had no knowledge of the stocks he owned,� Mr. Burton said. “And when he realized that he didn’t have the level of blindness that he expected, he moved to terminate the trust.�
Ethically, is he okay? I think yes, because he can say the moment he found out it, he did something about it.
But one last thing…
Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly come to invest in two relatively obscure companies, whose backers happen to include generous contributors to his political committees. Among those donors was Jared Abbruzzese, a New York businessman now at the center of an F.B.I. inquiry into public corruption in Albany, who had also contributed to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group that sought to undermine John Kerry’s Democratic presidential campaign in 2004.
Well, well, well…the plot thickens…
More on this as it develops…
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 and is filed under 2008 Election, Elections, Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 7th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Uh huh, “blind” trust - with about five seeing eye dogs, a cane and guy with a whistle.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
The reason for a blind trust is so the investor cannot know what he owns in individual companies, much less how much he owns or how the stock price is going. The original trust became open when one of the companies sent him a prospectus, whereupon Obama sold the stock. So the only option he had was to set up another blind trust, which he did.
Earlier this afternoon, a NYT article stated, in part:
“In May 2005, Mr. Abbruzzese, who was vice chairman of Tejas and a principal investor in Skyterra, contributed $10,000 along with his wife to Mr. Obama’s political action committee â€â€? a departure from his almost exclusive support of Republicans. Eight months earlier, for instance, he had contributed $5,000 to the Swift Boat group, and he has given $100,000 to the Republican National Committee since 2004.”
So this guy, obviously leans towards conservatives & donates less than 10% of his campaign donations to Obama’s campaign. I wonder how the figures work out for the rest of the company execs who contributed to Obama’s campaign? And I wonder if one of them may have “leaked” the info to make Obama look bad? I also point out that all the figures came from Obama’s own campaign financial disclosures.
Like all the other smears against him, this one also smells like dead fish.
March 7th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Thanks for the details bob. It sounded like it was something like that, but the story wasn’t exactly illuminating. I wish you had a chance to take a crack at it first. :-)
March 8th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Thanks, Justin. What P****s me off is the NYT probably put the headline and the first 3 - 5 paragraphs on the front page, & buried the rest deep inside the paper.. Now what is all this talk about the MSM being liberal?
March 10th, 2007 at 8:07 am
At least you reported that Avi Biopharma was developing a drug to treat bird flu rather than a vaccine as reported elsewhere but that is hardly the main thrust of the original antisense company.
I was enchanted that the senator, who introduced a bill to direct the FDA political hacks’s attention toward genetic medicine, would invest in the stock of a company that whomped up a possible cure for ebola in a day or two after a lab technician was thought to be infected. The drug was never tested but later got it a bundle from DOD for further research into bioterror weapons.
Sadly, Obama never knew because of a blind trust and now is faulted for that.
Oh well.
Best, Terry
March 19th, 2007 at 7:55 am
The first time I meet this ideal from your article, so I will try to understand your topoint for it.Sometimes new way to the truth for it. ah. isn’t it?