* helped them every step of the way. Treason.
Report: Bush signed lockup letter
By CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last update: 10:52 p.m. EDT July 15, 2002
WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- Two and a half months before George W. Bush sold his stock in Harken Energy Corp., he signed a "lockup" letter promising to hold onto the shares for at least six months, according to internal company documents obtained by the Washington Post.
The Post reported late Tuesday that the letter, signed by Bush on April 3, 1990, is now being compared with the account his lawyers gave federal securities regulators who examined the stock sale as a possible insider trade.
According to the Post story, the letter Bush signed promising to hold onto the stock was released by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Freedom of Information Act. At the time he signed it, Harken (HEC: ), was considering a public stock offering to raise money to solve a cash flow problem.
The President's lawyers have said that Bush had a pre-existing plan to sell his stock in Harken and other companies to pay a tax bill and a loan he owed for his stake in the Texas Rangers ball team.
http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid={C1852050-B4B6-4A57-B4C8-374A5B3BA25C}&siteid=mktw
Buzzflash has an excellent "The Bush Harken Insider Trading Collection", with good links, some are included below:
http://www.buzzflash.com/perspectives/bush_harken.htmlThe Bush Harken Insider Trading Collection
Don't let Bush fool you, he's as slimy a businessman as any that ran Enron.
Harken Energy Chronology
October 25, 2002
The purpose of this chronology is to show plainly and clearly that:
1. President George W. Bush did indeed have material non-public knowledge of adverse financial conditions at Harken Energy Co. prior to the sale of his Harken stock and therefore violated 15 U.S.C. § 78u-1 , insider trading of securities based upon material non-public information.
2. The Securities and Exchange Commission was indeed aware of Bush s insider trading violation and chose to stand down.
3. While serving on the Board of Directors at Harken Energy Company, George W. Bush s performance, motives and ethics were no different than those of the corporate executives and officers of Enron, Worldcom or any other national corporation being criticized by Bush for doing what he did.
4. The Aloha Petroleum sale was an act of fraud and Bush was in a position to know it and prevent it.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0210/S00178.htm Bush and Harken
By Jason Leopold
July 18, 2002
Last week, while Bush spoke to Wall Street about corporate malfeasance, he was beset by questions about the timing of his sale of stock twelve years ago while he served as a director of Harken Energy. Bush sold the Harken stock about two months before the company reported huge losses and shortly before Iraq invaded Kuwait, leaving many asking whether the President had benefited from inside information. In addition, Bush was tardy in filing the appropriate sale-related forms with the SEC. Bush has said he filed the proper documents with the SEC on time--even though it arrived thirty-four weeks late--and suggested the agency must have lost the file. Last week, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said there had been a "mix-up" by the Bush lawyers who handled the paperwork.
While SEC reporting requirements may seem like a minor issue, it's crucial information for the average investor because it allows them to determine whether insiders have received undisclosed information about the company's financial condition. The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934 requires company insiders to disclose publicly, in a report called a Form 4, all stock purchases and sales by the tenth day of the month following the transaction.
This week, as President Bush's own business acumen is being called into question, additional SEC documents show that Bush violated federal securities laws on three other occasions during his tenure at Harken by missing the deadline for filing documents about his stock transactions with the SEC.
Bush purchased stock in Harken three times between 1986 and 1989, and was several months late in reporting those transactions to the SEC, according to documents from the agency. One transaction, in which Bush purchased 25,000 shares of Harken stock on June 16, 1989, took place three days before Harken started selling its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, where the stock traded as high as $50. The stock had previously been sold in the over-the-counter market. Bush did not report the transaction to the SEC until September 7, 1989, more than four weeks after the deadline, according to SEC documents, and he reaped a windfall in profits by purchasing the additional shares before they were sold on the NYSE.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20020722/leopold20020718Bush and Harken Energy
As George Bush announces a crackdown on corporate fraud, the president's own financial dealings from 10 years ago have come under renewed scrutiny, as Mark Tran explains
* Mark Tran
* guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 July 2002 11.06 BST
* Article history
What is the fuss over Mr Bush's financial transactions?
On June 22 1990, George Bush, then a director with a company called Harken Energy, sold 212,140 shares for $848,000 (£548,100). Almost exactly two months later, on August 20, Harken announced a $23.2m loss, which caused its shares to drop to $2.375 from $3. The next day, Harken returned to $3, but fell to $1 at the end of 1990.
Did Mr Bush do anything wrong?
Although the law requires prompt disclosure of what are called insider sales, or sales by senior executives, Mr Bush did not inform the securities and exchange commission (SEC), the US market regulator, until 34 weeks later. So technically Mr Bush was at fault. Bush supporters say that he did fully disclose the transaction, and that "half of corporate America was filing forms late at that time".
How does Mr Bush explain the episode?
A decade ago, Mr Bush blamed the SEC, which he said had lost the forms he had filed. When the story resurfaced last week, the White House admitted that this had not been the case. Instead, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer blamed the delay on "a mix-up with the attorneys", but could not shed light on how the confusion arose.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/10/qanda.usaPublished on Wednesday, October 30, 2002 by the Boston Globe
Board Was Told of Risks Before Bush Stock Sale
Harken memo went to SEC after probe
by Michael Kranish and Beth Healy
WASHINGTON - One week before George W. Bush's now-famous sale of stock in Harken Energy Corp. in 1990, Harken was warned by its lawyers that Bush and other members of the troubled oil company's board faced possible insider trading risks if they unloaded their shares.
The warning from Harken's lawyers came in a legal memorandum whose existence has been little noted until now, despite the many years of scrutiny of the Bush transaction. The memo was not received by the Securities and Exchange Commission until the day after the agency decided not to bring insider-trading charges against Bush, documents show.
"It appears that Mr. Bush had insider information, that he was told that such insider information could be considered material,
was given express warnings about what the consequences could be." Michael Aguirre
California securities lawyer
The memo, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe, does not say directly whether Bush would face legal problems if he sold his stock. But it does lay out the potential for insider-trading violations by Bush and other members of the Harken board, and its existence raises questions about how thoroughly the SEC investigated Bush's unloading of $848,000 of his Harken stake to a buyer whose name has not been made public.
The SEC cleared Bush after looking into whether he had insider knowledge of an upcoming quarterly loss at Harken. But the SEC investigation apparently never examined a key issue raised in the memo: whether Bush's insider knowledge of a plan to rescue the company from financial collapse by spinning off two troubled units was a factor in his decision to sell.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1030-06.htm
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