Jeb Bush: The Forest Gump of Financial Improprieties?

[marmar]

Jeb Bush: The Forest Gump of Financial Improprieties?
Posted on December 18, 2014 by Yves Smith


The Financial Times has an unusual story featured prominently today. As Jeb Bush has made a soft launch of his presidential campaign, the pink paper has published a surprisingly long list of financial relationships that do not put the Florida governor in a particularly good light.

The intriguing part isn’t so much a history of dubious-looking complicated money dealings. It’s the fact that many of them are live. Jeb apparently couldn’t be bothered to clean them up. That strategy didn’t work too well for Mitt Romney, who was forced effectively to admit that his wife Ann Romney’s Olympic horse Rafalca was not a business and hence not a permissible deduction on the Romney tax returns. There was also the consternation over his failure to release five years of tax returns as would have been customary. Some theorized that it was because Romney paid no taxes in those years, but the guess among tax experts was that Romney had declared a formerly secret Swiss bank account under an amnesty program. One of the conditions of getting amnesty was refiling prior year tax returns. Those returns would be “stapled,” as in they would clearly show that the returns had originally been filed not showing the Swiss bank account, and then had been amended to included it.

The issue revealed by the Romney tax return debate, as well as the consternation about his remarks at a supposedly closed-door speech where he derided the non-income-taxpaying 47% of the US (which includes the unemployed, students and people who make too little income to be subject to income taxes but nevertheless pay FICA and sales taxes) is that even rich Republicans are not immune from scrutiny as to their financial conduct and their implicit or explicit attitude towards the non-wealthy. Despite the stereotype, not all Republican voters are rich. For instance, evangelical Christians are not the power in the party that they once were but are still far more inclined to vote Republican than Democrat.

So the issue with Jeb isn’t who he’s been in bed with financially, per se, but that he couldn’t be bothered to tidy up his record.

For my money, the stunner comes late in the article: Jeb is currently an advisor to Barclays. These big misbehaving banks tend to become all of a muchness over time, so to refresh your memory, Barclays was a central actor in the Libor price-rigging scandal. Its efforts to defy the Bank of England and implicate Paul Tucker, the heir apparent to the Governor Mervyn King’s job, led the Bank of England to force the resignation of the top three officers at Barclays, its chairman, CEO, and president. The UK’s Serious Fraud Office has filed criminal charges against three Barclays officers; one of them has been indicted in the US. The SFO is also investigating a 2008 equity infusion from the Qatar sovereign wealth fund that Barclays used to just escape a taxpayer rescue. The allegation is that Barclays paid fees to Qatar that were really tantamount to bribes and that the sovereign wealth fund and Challenger, the prime minister’s investment company, worked with Barclays to misrepresent its financial condition to regulators and the public. ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/12/jeb-bush-forest-gump-financial-improprieties.html

[Hoppy]

1. To me, the major point of the article is that Jebby The Hut is helping the 1% avoid taxes.

He has established private equity funds that operate out of our borders and avoid U.S. taxes. That might play against him.

[Vinca]

2. Romney Part Deux.