March 23, 2006
The LA Times is reporting today
that "Uncle Bucky" William H.T. Bush, younger brother of Bush 41, has
just made close to a cool $3 million from the sale of a company that
profited from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Just another coincidence like Bill Frist's "non-insider trading blind
trust profits" or Halliburton just happening to get record profits and
no-bid contracts or Carlyle Group profiting handsomely or Karzai's coincidental connection to Unocal before being installed as puppet leader in Afghanistan....
And if that wasn't enough to make you want to throw something out the
window, the company is the target of not one but two SEC investigations.
More below:
According
to the LA Times article, Engineered Support Systems Inc. had recently
seen record growth as a result of increased US military contracts (some
no-bid contracts as well), mostly for the war effort in Iraq and
Afghanistan wars.
But don't worry, says Uncle Bucky - everything is on the up and up:
in an interview last year, he said he played no role in ESSI's winning federal contracts.
"I don't make any calls to the 202 [Washington, D.C.] area code," he said.
Um, you probably don't have to make any calls to the 202 area code when
you can just call Crawford or big brother (irony not lost there)
himself.
As for the SEC investigations, we have a nice juicy inquiry about
faulty equipment and the selling of stock and stock options before the
public was made aware of the faulty equipment.
SEC filings show that two federal investigations of
ESSI are underway. One inquiry involves a stop order from the
government on the field generators. The order was issued because the
units didn't operate properly.
The generator contract was a major source of revenue. SEC files
show that ESSI did not tell stockholders about the stop order until
last June, about seven months after it was issued.
During the interim, several ESSI executives, including Bush's
uncle, cashed in stock and stock options worth millions of dollars, the
filings show.
According to one recent filing, the SEC and the U.S. attorney in St.
Louis are investigating the delayed disclosure and other matters.
Unnamed members of the ESSI board and corporate officers have been subpoenaed in the inquiry, according to documents.
SEC filings show that William Bush, 67, exercised options on
8,348 shares of ESSI stock on Jan. 18, 2005, about two months after the
stop order was issued and six months before it was disclosed. He
collected about $450,000 in cash.
And now, the sale of ESSI to DRS Technology at the end of January has
netted Uncle Bucky $800,000 in stock and just under $2,000,000 in cash.
Does anyone want to guess how quickly this scandal will get brushed aside?
Just unbelievable. But par for the course with these criminals. And how many people don't have healthcare?
