Reply #24: What does Terry McAulliffe have in common with GHW Bush? Global Crossing [View All]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/07/12/politics/main515049.shtml

Corporate irresponsibility has become the Democratic Party’s main line of attack this week. Democratic honcho Howard Wolfson opened a can of worms in a meeting with members of the press when he said that corporate accountability could be a winning issue for Democrats across the nation.

Wolfson said, "While Democrats are on the side of investors, the GOP is on the side of corporate malfeasance" and he "couldn’t think of a district where this issue wouldn’t play."

But while the Democrats have made a major effort to tie the White House and the GOP to the corporate scandals, the party pining to recapture control of Congress has its own corporate cross to bear in fallen telecommunications giant Global Crossing.

The Center for Responsive Politics released a report earlier this year showing that of the $3.6 million that Global donated to parties and candidates since 1997, 55 percent went to Democrats.

The FBI and the SEC are investigating Global Crossing after the firm filed for bankruptcy this year. The telecommunications company was charged with dishonest accounting, enriching top executives to the detriment of lower level employees and misleading investors about its financial prosperity.

Ken Johnson, a spokesman for Rep. Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, chairman the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said, “As in the case of Enron, we’re trying to determine if some clever accounting hocus-pocus created an illusion of profitability.”

Among Democrats benefiting from Global Crossing were Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who made $18 million when he cashed out most of his $100,000 investment in the company back in '98 and '99.

The DNC chair was at one point a consultant to Global Crossing’s founder Gary Winnick and reportedly arranged golfing dates between Winnick and former President Clinton.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Crossing

Political contributions

Winnick helped Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe turn a $100,000 stock investment into $18,000,000. Winnick later gave a million dollars to President Bill Clinton's presidential library.

In 1998, former U.S. president George H. W. Bush gave a speech in Tokyo on behalf of Global Crossing, for which he was compensated with $50,000 of Global Crossing stock which he sold in 1999 and 2000 for more than $4.5 million.

Global Crossing's political contributions tended to be fairly evenly distributed between Republican and Democratic parties, with co-chairman Winnick tending to favor Democrats and co-chairman Cook favoring Republicans. In 2000, the company gave $250,000 each to the Republican and Democratic Conventions. In 1999, the company hired former assistant attorney general Anne Bingaman, wife of Democratic New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, as a Washington lobbyist, paying her $2.5 million between January and June of 1999 to try to block licensing of an AT&T, MCI, and Sprint consortium cable from the U.S. to Japan. The large bicameral donations have been suggested to be a reason why investigations against the company's upper management did not result in any criminal charges, despite the size of the bankruptcy and the large amount of circumstantial evidence that some sort of malfeasance had occurred.<6>

It has remained a major name in the business, and it also became a corporate partner of various governmental and academic networks, such as the UK's Immigration and Nationality Directorate, the U.S. government, European academic networks GEANT, SURFnet and others, the US Internet2 and the Canadian CA*Net.

In late 2006, Global Crossing announced acquisitions of Fibernet, a provider of private network services in the UK, and Impsat, an Internet provider in South America.

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