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Politics : Impeach George W. Bush -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (33591)	6/11/2005 10:50:04 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 93284

the Clinton administration did far more for Enron in exchange for the money. For example, Enron got government loans and guarantees for the Dabhol Power plant in India to the tune of six hundred million dollars from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. And the Clinton administration threatened to cut off foreign aid to Mozambique if it didn’t sign a pipeline deal with Enron. While the Democrats have been eager to investigate Enron, there has been no interest on their part to hear from former Clinton Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin. Rubin has been the Chairman of Citigroup since 1999. Citigroup is a major creditor of Enron, with loans outstanding of an estimated billion dollars. Evidence was revealed in recent hearings that senior officers at Citigroup, according to the New York Times, "misrepresented the full nature of a transaction with Enron...so that the energy company could ignore accounting requirements and hide its true financial condition..." The evidence shows that Citigroup established several offshore shell corporations to help Enron hide billions of dollars of debt. And when things started to collapse for Enron, Mr. Rubin stepped in on their behalf. Enron’s problems first became public knowledge last October, and on November 8th, they restated their earnings showing their figures had been off by over a half billion dollars. That day, Rubin called Peter Fisher, the undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance, and asked him what he thought of the idea of calling the credit rating agencies on Enron’s behalf. Fisher rejected it, and Rubin then contacted the managing director of Moody’s, a major credit rating agency, asking for a higher credit rating for Enron. Anything to keep from revealing the true condition of the company. To the New York Times, this was an unfortunate misstep by Rubin that "inadvertently gave comfort to the White House and to some conservative commentators’ by adding a prominent Democratic name to the list of Enron’s friends." Senator Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, has left the decision on whether or not to call Rubin to testify to Senator Carl Levin who chairs the Subcommittee on Investigations and has said he has no interest in having Rubin testify. Lieberman, a presidential hopeful, appears to be ducking his responsibility. Could this be because he and a group he founded have received a lot of money from Enron related interests, including Citigroup, which has been the largest single contributor for the past five years? Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org accuracyinmedia.com