The Bush Boys, SERIOUS Conflicts of interest

[BuckeFushe]

Reading about the escapades of Neil Bush in his quest for sexual fulfillment in Asia yesterday (NY Post report on his divorce deposition)I remembered something I read quite a while ago NOT involving Silverado S&L. What I've found this morning is pretty chilling, and I hope the information here is not too disjointed. Some took a long time to find, much popped up like a daisy seedling. And a lot of good people have written about Neil and Jeb, but all of a sudden, I began to connect the dots, and the Continent of Africa, Jeb, Neil, and the President are linked like a fence on the back 40.
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Jeb Bush was approached in 1985 by Miguel Recarey Jr., owner of Miami-based International Medical Centers, a large health maintenance organization. Recarey said he needed an office building, but he also complained to Bush about the Department of Health and Human Services' tightening Medicare rules, which threatened to cut into IMC's profits.

Recarey asked Jeb Bush to call a Medicare official who had worked on George Bush's campaigns. Jeb Bush agreed to call to urge "fair treatment" for Recarey, but denies seeking special favors. Recarey paid Bush's real estate company $75,000, a fee some say was payment for Bush's intervention. Bush says it was for his real estate work. IMC never picked a building shown by Bush. (Bush has since said he wasn't aware that Recarey already had an arrest record and spent 30 days in jail in 1973 for income tax evasion.)

IMC was shut down by regulators in 1987 because it was insolvent. At least $200-million in Medicare money was missing. Recarey was convicted on various charges, but he fled the country. More than 10 years later, Recarey remains on the FBI's list of international fugitives wanted for fraud and bribery.
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MWI Corporation of Florida, in which Jeb Bush was once a partner and Neil Bush did the footwork for, is in court over allegations of bribery in selling water pumps in Nigeria. MWI is trying to seal all kinds of records, including many covering Neil and Jeb's involvement.

The Justice Department filed a civil complaint against MWI and Eller (David Eller, a Broward County Republican fund-raiser), saying they improperly funneled one third of the $74-million to a Nigerian agent as commission money. In turn, the complaint says, the agent and other company officials paid Nigerian government officials who then bought MWI pumps. The federal complaint also says that Eller twice flew suitcases of cash to offshore tax havens to hide his assets.

Bush got reacquainted with David Eller, owner of M&W Pump (now MWI Corporation), a Deerfield Beach water pump company, who was tapped by then-Gov. Bob Martinez for the state lottery commission. He and Eller formed Bush-El Corp. in 1988 to market M&W's irrigation and flood control pumps. Bush went to Nigeria, where he pledged his father would increase aid to developing countries, according to Nigerian press reports. The company relied on pump sales financed by U.S.-backed loans when President Bush was in the White House. In 1989, Jeb Bush and his wife traveled to Nigeria with a executives of M&W Pump. Jeb and Columba Bush were received by Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida and celebrated by tens of thousands of Nigerians who turned out to see the son of the U.S. president. President Babangida expressed his interest in visiting the White House -- a request Jeb promised to pass along to his father -- and by 1992 the Florida pump company had secured $74 million in financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States. It was by far the largest Ex-Im deal M&W had ever done in Nigeria -- a country Ex-Im loan officers considered a bad risk.

One lingering question about the pump sales in Nigeria: Did Bush use his political connections to line up U.S. backed loans needed to finance Nigeria's pump purchases? The sales depended on $74-million in loans from the federally backed Export-Import Bank of the United States. Eller in a written statement, said Neil Bush coordinated private financing, which fell through. But he contends Bush didn't have anything to do with getting the U.S.-backed loans. Nigeria has yet to repay most of the loans. If they fail to repay them, U.S. taxpayers foot the bill.

Neil Bush said his commissions from Bush-El came from work in countries that didn't use U.S.-backed loans. But Bush-El has been sued by Robert Purcell, a former vice president of M&W, who alleges he was cheated out of $1-million because profits were diverted to the Bush-Eller partnership. Bush invested no money in Bush-El. His total proceeds: $648,250. Eller and his family also gave the state GOP $25,280 in August and chipped in $5,250 to the Bush campaign.

There is "no conflict of interest. ... We're just capitalizing on whatever good feelings exist," an executive from the company Neil Bush represented later told Seymour Hersh, who laid out the embarrassing story on the pages of The New Yorker in September 1993. Neil, according to Hersh, later returned to Kuwait and set up shop in the International Hotel in Kuwait City, where he tried to secure a management contract with Kuwait's Ministry of Electricity and Water. Neil's deal included foreign and Kuwaiti members of the Enron consortium, and would have had the Kuwaiti government paying a management fee to a Kuwaiti company that was owned in part by a private company set up in the Caribbean or some other tax haven. "The offshore firm would have various owners, in Europe and elsewhere, one of which would be a company in which Neil Bush had an interest," The New Yorker reported. The scheme was ingenious, a financial analyst told Hersh."If you looked at one of the contracts, how in the hell would you know that Bush was in it?" The whole deal was as unsavory and unpardonable as a round of golf with Hillary Clinton sibling Huey Rodham.
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For three years ending in 2002, the worst drought in half a century held Florida in its grip. It wilted crops and drained lakes, turned forests into tinder and threatened the water supply for millions of residents. It also brought a deal worth $1.9-million to a water-pump company owned by Gov. Jeb Bush's former business partner.

The pump contract was hastily awarded to MWI Corp. of Deerfield Beach in September 2000, after the board of the South Florida Water Management District agreed to waive its rules requiring competitive bidding. The nine-member board, which included six Bush appointees, did not give the contract directly to MWI. Instead, in another departure from normal procedure, the board left that decision to its staff, which asked MWI to help design the project and write the specifications. They also drafted a memo saying MWI would get the work a day before MWI quoted a written price.
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There is also a connection between Eller and Cherine Scandar, CEO of M&W SODECO INT'L, which provides turnkey projects mainly to the Minsitry of Agriculture and Ministry of Public Works and Water Resources in Egypt.
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Additionally, Neil Bush is promoting a new business venture in Florida with the potential to benefit from his brother's policies. The Texas-based business, called Ignite, is tailoring software to help middle-school students prepare for the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, a standardized test that is the backbone of Gov. Bush's ''A+'' plan that grades schools.

The software, which Ignite is custom-designing for several states from California to Florida, is being used as a pilot in an Orlando-area middle school that has received millions in state grants to study ways of improving efficiency and lowering costs.

The school is using the software for free, but the pilot gives Ignite a firm foothold in one of the nation's biggest education technology markets.

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References:

http://www.austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-03-16/pols_feature3.html

http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/4378776.htm

http://www.weallcount.org/content/articles/archives/0025.asp

http://www.sptimes.com/State/92098/Make_The_Money_and_Ru.html


If you have more to add, it would only benefit all of us.

[donsu]

1. thank you - we need all the connect-the-money-dots that we can get

and what a scam is Neils education thing.

[Karenina]

2. There's an old Mother Jones article

I'll go see if I can find it, about the *boys corrupt financial activities. These *guys make the Mafia look like the Boy Scouts.