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Harry Dope
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 Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 6:55 pm Post subject: Obama a criminal? |
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March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
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."
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the
presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians
who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his
actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months
that he owned the stocks.
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.
Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already
had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major
campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial
transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had
been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been
indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas'
purchase of a home.
Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks - even in
companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit from
legislation they advance - and indeed other members of Congress have
investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers
should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit
themselves.
Mr. Obama's sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to
have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out
amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash accounts,
a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned $2,000 on the
biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the satellite
communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the Obama
campaign.
Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that
other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater
flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from
its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after receiving
a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was set up.
The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden financial
success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He had signed
a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports show that he
received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.
His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a
promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they
bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that
was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama's political
donors bought the adjacent lot.
The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred
thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond
fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.
But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say
was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was also
a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public securities
filings show.
Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr.
Obama's campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr.
Haywood declined to comment.
Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr.
Obama initiated what he has called "one of my top priorities since arriving
in the Senate," a push to increase federal financing to fight avian flu.
Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia,
and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of
millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to call
for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an urgent
public health threat.
His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease
in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005, he
introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and urging
the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.
Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt,
the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama
and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another bill
to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.
Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been
working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a
conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company's
chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was "aggressively going forward"
with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.
The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other areas,
provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005, including one on
Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a treatment for avian flu
"in a relatively short time."
Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the company's
stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or about $1 a
share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they never talked
to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the company has
received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs for treating
ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received any federal
money for its avian flu research.
The company's stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006 when
it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the company
still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the drug.
Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama's
stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a
promising start.
He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications
Commission ruled in favor of the company's effort to create a nationwide
wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications
systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a regional
brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a
research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.
Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama's
political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The
company's chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator in
Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several
political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.
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 - 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.
Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies
in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal
investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno.
The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno's personal business dealings, including
whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for Senate approval
of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese's companies. Both men have denied any
wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Skyterra's share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the
strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low 30s,
and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on Nov. 1,
2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today trades
below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company's top officials
had not been aware of Mr. Obama's investment. |
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Patrick
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 7:16 pm Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
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On Wed, 7 Mar 2007 08:55:22 -0500, Harry Dope wrote:
There is certainly nothing in the article to indicate that he's a criminal.
Are lies and distortions the best you can do?
| Quote: |
March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
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."
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the
presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians
who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his
actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months
that he owned the stocks.
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.
Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already
had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major
campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial
transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had
been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been
indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas'
purchase of a home.
Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks - even in
companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit from
legislation they advance - and indeed other members of Congress have
investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers
should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit
themselves.
Mr. Obama's sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to
have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out
amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash accounts,
a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned $2,000 on the
biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the satellite
communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the Obama
campaign.
Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that
other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater
flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from
its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after receiving
a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was set up.
The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden financial
success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He had signed
a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports show that he
received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.
His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a
promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they
bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that
was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama's political
donors bought the adjacent lot.
The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred
thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond
fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.
But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say
was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was also
a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public securities
filings show.
Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr.
Obama's campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr.
Haywood declined to comment.
Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr.
Obama initiated what he has called "one of my top priorities since arriving
in the Senate," a push to increase federal financing to fight avian flu.
Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia,
and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of
millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to call
for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an urgent
public health threat.
His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease
in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005, he
introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and urging
the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.
Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt,
the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama
and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another bill
to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.
Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been
working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a
conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company's
chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was "aggressively going forward"
with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.
The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other areas,
provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005, including one on
Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a treatment for avian flu
"in a relatively short time."
Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the company's
stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or about $1 a
share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they never talked
to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the company has
received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs for treating
ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received any federal
money for its avian flu research.
The company's stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006 when
it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the company
still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the drug.
Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama's
stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a
promising start.
He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications
Commission ruled in favor of the company's effort to create a nationwide
wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications
systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a regional
brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a
research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.
Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama's
political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The
company's chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator in
Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several
political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.
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 - 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.
Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies
in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal
investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno.
The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno's personal business dealings, including
whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for Senate approval
of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese's companies. Both men have denied any
wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Skyterra's share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the
strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low 30s,
and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on Nov. 1,
2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today trades
below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company's top officials
had not been aware of Mr. Obama's investment. |
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Server 13
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 8:27 pm Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
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More stolen republik00kery, no criminality involved.
Republicans - all lies, all the time.
"Harry Dope" <IgnorantLiberal@aol.com> wrote in message
news:45eec460$0$24723$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
| Quote: |
March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
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."
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the
presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians
who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of
his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight
months that he owned the stocks.
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.
Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has
already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance
on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal
financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year
that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has
since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to
the Obamas' purchase of a home.
Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks - even in
companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit
from legislation they advance - and indeed other members of Congress have
investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers
should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit
themselves.
Mr. Obama's sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to
have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out
amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash
accounts, a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned
$2,000 on the biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the
satellite communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the
Obama campaign.
Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that
other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater
flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from
its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after
receiving a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was
set up.
The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden
financial success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He
had signed a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports
show that he received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.
His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a
promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they
bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property
that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama's
political donors bought the adjacent lot.
The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred
thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond
fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.
But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say
was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was
also a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public
securities filings show.
Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr.
Obama's campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr.
Haywood declined to comment.
Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr.
Obama initiated what he has called "one of my top priorities since
arriving in the Senate," a push to increase federal financing to fight
avian flu.
Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia,
and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of
millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to
call for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an
urgent public health threat.
His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease
in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005,
he introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and
urging the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.
Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt,
the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama
and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another
bill to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.
Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been
working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a
conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company's
chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was "aggressively going forward"
with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.
The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other
areas, provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005,
including one on Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a
treatment for avian flu "in a relatively short time."
Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the
company's stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or
about $1 a share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they
never talked to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the
company has received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs
for treating ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received
any federal money for its avian flu research.
The company's stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006
when it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the
company still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the
drug.
Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama's
stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a
promising start.
He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications
Commission ruled in favor of the company's effort to create a nationwide
wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications
systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a
regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra,
issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in
value.
Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama's
political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The
company's chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator
in Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several
political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.
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 - 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.
Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies
in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal
investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L.
Bruno. The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno's personal business dealings,
including whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for
Senate approval of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese's companies. Both men
have denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls
seeking comment.
Skyterra's share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the
strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low
30s, and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on
Nov. 1, 2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today
trades below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company's top
officials had not been aware of Mr. Obama's investment.
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Cognitus
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 8:31 pm Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
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On Mar 7, 7:55 am, "Harry Dope" <IgnorantLibe...@aol.com> wrote:
| Quote: |
March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
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."
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the
presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians
who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his
actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months
that he owned the stocks.
Even so, the stock purchases raise questions about how he could unwittingly
come to invest
|
Not necessary to read further.
Obviously asshead-Dope does not understand the concept of a
blind trust. |
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NuGrass
Guest
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| Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 8:49 pm Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
|
|
On Mar 7, 8:55�am, "Harry Dope" <IgnorantLibe...@aol.com> wrote:
| Quote: |
March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
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."
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the
presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians
who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of his
actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight months
that he owned the stocks.
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.
Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has already
had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance on a major
campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal financial
transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year that it had
been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has since been
indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to the Obamas'
purchase of a home.
Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks - even in
companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit from
legislation they advance - and indeed other members of Congress have
investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers
should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit
themselves.
Mr. Obama's sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to
have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out
amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash accounts,
a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned $2,000 on the
biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the satellite
communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the Obama
campaign.
Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that
other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater
flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from
its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after receiving
a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was set up.
The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden financial
success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He had signed
a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports show that he
received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.
His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a
promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they
bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property that
was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama's political
donors bought the adjacent lot.
The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred
thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond
fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.
But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say
was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was also
a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public securities
filings show.
Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr.
Obama's campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr.
Haywood declined to comment.
Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr.
Obama initiated what he has called "one of my top priorities since arriving
in the Senate," a push to increase federal financing to fight avian flu.
Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia,
and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of
millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to call
for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an urgent
public health threat.
His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease
in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005, he
introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and urging
the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.
Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt,
the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama
and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another bill
to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.
Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been
working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a
conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company's
chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was "aggressively going forward"
with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.
The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other areas,
provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005, including one on
Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a treatment for avian flu
"in a relatively short time."
Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the company's
stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or about $1 a
share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they never talked
to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the company has
received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs for treating
ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received any federal
money for its avian flu research.
The company's stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006 when
it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the company
still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the drug.
Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama's
stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a
promising start.
He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications
Commission ruled in favor of the company's effort to create a nationwide
wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications
systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a regional
brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a
research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.
Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama's
political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The
company's chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator in
Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several
political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.
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 - 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.
Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies
in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal
investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno.
The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno's personal business dealings, including
whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for Senate approval
of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese's companies. Both men have denied any
wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Skyterra's share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the
strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the ...
read more »
|
That should get him a few more republican votes if he gets pat the
primary. Except for he KKK, of course.
David |
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Joseph Welch
Guest
|
| Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2007 9:15 pm Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
|
|
"Harry Dope" <IgnorantLiberal@aol.com> wrote in message
news:45eec460$0$24723$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
| Quote: |
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.
|
Um, yeah.
So what?
--
____________________
George W. Bush has made the terrorists stronger, their influence wider,
their numbers larger, and their motivation to attack the U.S. and other
western interests greater. He has repeatedly abused his authority and
violated his Oath of Office by turning his back on the United States
Constitution; thereby surrendering to the terrorists by undermining American
freedoms,values, and the very foundations of our system of government.
Supporting Bush is treason.
_____________________
JW
***************
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have
you left no sense of decency?"
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
The New Face of the Republican Party
http://tinyurl.com/y2j2yr |
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Larry Hewitt
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 2:53 am Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
|
|
"Harry Dope" <IgnorantLiberal@aol.com> wrote in message
news:45eec460$0$24723$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
| Quote: |
March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
|
Repuglicon desperation is increasing i the wake of the Libby convction.
Obama had nothingto do witht hte purchase.
He never spoke to company officials nor did he vote on legislation that
wouod help them.
He sold the stock at a loss when he determined the broker running his blind
trust wasn;t doinghis job and felt he needed to liquidate the offending
stocks.
Larry
| Quote: |
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.
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."
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the
presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians
who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of
his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight
months that he owned the stocks.
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.
Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has
already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance
on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal
financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year
that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has
since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to
the Obamas' purchase of a home.
Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks - even in
companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit
from legislation they advance - and indeed other members of Congress have
investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers
should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit
themselves.
Mr. Obama's sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to
have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out
amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash
accounts, a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned
$2,000 on the biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the
satellite communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the
Obama campaign.
Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that
other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater
flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from
its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after
receiving a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was
set up.
The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden
financial success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He
had signed a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports
show that he received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.
His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a
promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they
bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property
that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama's
political donors bought the adjacent lot.
The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred
thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond
fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.
But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say
was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was
also a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public
securities filings show.
Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr.
Obama's campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr.
Haywood declined to comment.
Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr.
Obama initiated what he has called "one of my top priorities since
arriving in the Senate," a push to increase federal financing to fight
avian flu.
Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia,
and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of
millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to
call for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an
urgent public health threat.
His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease
in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005,
he introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and
urging the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.
Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt,
the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama
and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another
bill to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.
Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been
working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a
conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company's
chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was "aggressively going forward"
with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.
The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other
areas, provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005,
including one on Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a
treatment for avian flu "in a relatively short time."
Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the
company's stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or
about $1 a share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they
never talked to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the
company has received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs
for treating ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received
any federal money for its avian flu research.
The company's stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006
when it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the
company still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the
drug.
Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama's
stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a
promising start.
He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications
Commission ruled in favor of the company's effort to create a nationwide
wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications
systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a
regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra,
issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in
value.
Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama's
political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The
company's chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator
in Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several
political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.
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 - 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.
Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies
in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal
investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L.
Bruno. The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno's personal business dealings,
including whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for
Senate approval of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese's companies. Both men
have denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls
seeking comment.
Skyterra's share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the
strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low
30s, and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on
Nov. 1, 2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today
trades below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company's top
officials had not been aware of Mr. Obama's investment.
|
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Speeders & Drunk Drivers
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 11:49 am Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
|
|
"Harry Dope" <IgnorantLiberal@aol.com> wrote in
news:45eec460$0$24723$4c368faf@roadrunner.com:
Speaking of criminals both bush and cheney have convictions for drunk
driving which makes them violent drug criminals. And laura (the rammer)
bush murdered her boy friend and then bought her way out of prosecution. |
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jbeck
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:22 pm Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
|
|
"Harry Dope" <IgnorantLiberal@aol.com> wrote in message
news:45eec460$0$24723$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
| Quote: |
March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
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."
Mr. Obama has made ethics a signature issue, and his quest for the
presidency has benefited from the perception that he is unlike politicians
who blend public and private interests. There is no evidence that any of
his actions ended up benefiting either company during the roughly eight
months that he owned the stocks.
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.
Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed about the stock deals, has
already had to contend with a controversy that arose out of his reliance
on a major campaign contributor in Chicago to help him in a personal
financial transaction. In that earlier case, he acknowledged last year
that it had been a mistake to involve the contributor, a developer who has
since been indicted in an unrelated political scandal, in deals related to
the Obamas' purchase of a home.
Senate ethics rules do not prohibit lawmakers from owning stocks - even in
companies that do business with the federal government or could benefit
from legislation they advance - and indeed other members of Congress have
investments in government contractors. The rules say only that lawmakers
should not take legislative actions whose primary purpose is to benefit
themselves.
Mr. Obama's sale of his shares in the two companies ended what appears to
have been a brief foray into highly speculative investing that stood out
amid an otherwise conservative portfolio of mutual funds and cash
accounts, a review of his Senate disclosure statements shows. He earned
$2,000 on the biotech company, AVI BioPharma, and lost $15,000 on the
satellite communications concern, Skyterra, according to Mr. Burton of the
Obama campaign.
Mr. Burton said the trust was different from qualified blind trusts that
other senators commonly used, because it was intended to allow him greater
flexibility to address any accusations of conflicts that might arise from
its assets. He said Mr. Obama had decided to sell the stocks after
receiving a communication that made him concerned about how the trust was
set up.
The investments came at a time when Mr. Obama was enjoying sudden
financial success, following his victory at the polls in November 2004. He
had signed a $1.9 million book deal, and his ethics disclosure reports
show that he received $1.2 million of book money in 2005.
His wife, Michelle, a hospital vice president in Chicago, received a
promotion that March, nearly tripling her salary to $317,000, and they
bought a $1.6 million house in June. The house sat on a large property
that was subdivided to make it more affordable, and one of Mr. Obama's
political donors bought the adjacent lot.
The disclosure forms show that the Obamas also placed several hundred
thousand dollars in a new private-client account at JPMorgan Chase, a bond
fund and a checking account at a Chicago bank.
But he put $50,000 to $100,000 into an account at UBS, which his aides say
was recommended to him by a wealthy friend, George W. Haywood, who was
also a major investor in both Skyterra and AVI BioPharma, public
securities filings show.
Mr. Haywood and his wife, Cheryl, have contributed close to $50,000 to Mr.
Obama's campaigns and to his political action committee, the Hopefund. Mr.
Haywood declined to comment.
Within two weeks of his purchase of the biotech stock that Feb. 22, Mr.
Obama initiated what he has called "one of my top priorities since
arriving in the Senate," a push to increase federal financing to fight
avian flu.
Several dozen people had already died from the disease in Southeast Asia,
and experts were warning that a worldwide pandemic could kill tens of
millions of people. Mr. Obama was one of the first political leaders to
call for more money to head off the danger, which he described as an
urgent public health threat.
His first step came on March 4, 2005, when the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee approved his request for $25 million to help contain the disease
in Asia; the full Senate later approved that measure. And in April 2005,
he introduced a bill calling for more research on avian flu drugs and
urging the government to increase its stockpiles of antiviral medicines.
Mr. Obama repeated this call in a letter that Aug. 9 to Michael O. Levitt,
the health and human services secretary. And in September 2005, Mr. Obama
and Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, succeeded in amending another
bill to provide $3.8 billion for battling the flu.
Meanwhile, the drug company in which he invested, AVI BioPharma, had been
working to develop its own medicine to treat avian flu victims. In a
conference call with Wall Street analysts on March 8, 2005, the company's
chairman, Denis R. Burger, said the firm was "aggressively going forward"
with its avian flu research and hoped to work with federal agencies on it.
The company, which is also developing medicines in a number of other
areas, provided several updates on its avian flu research in 2005,
including one on Oct. 21 saying the company was likely to develop a
treatment for avian flu "in a relatively short time."
Mr. Obama sold what appears to have been about 2,000 shares of the
company's stock a week later, when it traded at about $3.50 a share, or
about $1 a share more than when he bought it. Company officials said they
never talked to the senator about his work on avian flu. And while the
company has received millions of dollars in federal money to develop drugs
for treating ebola and other serious diseases, it still has not received
any federal money for its avian flu research.
The company's stock briefly surged to nearly $9 a share in January 2006
when it announced promising research findings on the flu drug. But the
company still has not applied for federal approvals to test and market the
drug.
Unlike his investment in AVI, which yielded a small profit, Mr. Obama's
stake in Skyterra Communications went in the opposite direction, despite a
promising start.
He bought his Skyterra shares the same day the Federal Communications
Commission ruled in favor of the company's effort to create a nationwide
wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications
systems. Immediately after that morning ruling, Tejas Securities, a
regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra,
issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in
value.
Tejas and people associated with it were major donors to Mr. Obama's
political committees, having raised more than $150,000 since 2004. The
company's chairman, John J. Gorman, has held fund-raisers for the senator
in Austin, Tex., and arranged for him to use a private plane for several
political events in 2005. Mr. Gorman declined to comment.
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 - 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.
Last year, Mr. Abbruzzese, a major investor in several high-tech companies
in New York and elsewhere, emerged as a central figure in the federal
investigation of the New York State Senate majority leader, Joseph L.
Bruno. The inquiry is examining Mr. Bruno's personal business dealings,
including whether he accepted money from Mr. Abbruzzese in return for
Senate approval of grants for one of Mr. Abbruzzese's companies. Both men
have denied any wrongdoing. Mr. Abbruzzese did not return phone calls
seeking comment.
Skyterra's share price was lifted into the $40 range for a time on the
strength of the F.C.C. ruling, but eventually drifted down into the low
30s, and was at $31 when Mr. Obama sold his shares for a $15,000 loss on
Nov. 1, 2005. A few months later, it plunged into the $20 range, and today
trades below $10 a share. A spokesman for Skyterra said the company's top
officials had not been aware of Mr. Obama's investment.
|
Even if all true, he is still a more upstanding hopeful than Billary. |
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jbeck
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| Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2007 7:23 pm Post subject: Re: Obama a criminal? |
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"Larry Hewitt" <larryhewi@comporium.net> wrote in message
news:esnc9h$bbo$1@news04.infoave.net...
| Quote: |
"Harry Dope" <IgnorantLiberal@aol.com> wrote in message
news:45eec460$0$24723$4c368faf@roadrunner.com...
March 7, 2007
In '05 Investing, Obama Took Same Path as Donors
By MIKE McINTIRE and CHRISTOPHER DREW
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.
Repuglicon desperation is increasing i the wake of the Libby convction.
Obama had nothingto do witht hte purchase.
He never spoke to company officials nor did he vote on legislation that
wouod help them.
He sold the stock at a loss when he determined the broker running his
blind trust wasn;t doinghis job and felt he needed to liquidate the
offending stocks.
Larry
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Sure the article isn't originated from Hillary's campaign?
<snip> |
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