Word: harken
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George Bush Jr.'s affiliation with Harken began in the oil-bust year of 1986, when he and a group of partners received more than $2 million worth of Harken stock in exchange for his floundering 180-well Texas oil operation, Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., which had lost $400,000 in the six months before the sale. "His properties were pretty well encumbered," recalls director Watson. "The banks hadn't foreclosed, but that was in the wind." Not long after Bush joined Harken's board, he took charge of the Texas Rangers and shifted his attention largely to baseball...
...year after Bush came aboard, a reclusive Saudi named Abdullah Taha Bakhsh bought an 11% stake in Harken through a Netherlands Antilles shell company. The Saudi, a tycoon with global interests in oil, real estate and jewelry, hoped Harken could someday serve as a vehicle for moving Saudi crude into the U.S. But the strategy would never come to pass...
...Harken's biggest flaw as a would-be Big Oil Company was its lack of a refinery. In 1989 Quasha made a $190 million bid for a publicly held refinery, Tesoro Petroleum. Tesoro never had any interest in merging -- its board wouldn't even respond directly to the offer -- nor did Quasha have any interest in carrying out a hostile bid. The debacle wound up costing Harken millions of dollars in expenses. The only party to make out handsomely was Quasha himself; his law firm has collected more than $1 million in fees since + 1988 by handling these and other...
...several occasions Quasha's deals have been marked by apparent conflicts of interest. Last year he tried in vain to get Harken to buy a privately held refinery, Frontier Oil, in which he owned a sizable stake. In another instance Quasha sold Harken's Hawaiian retail unit to a company controlled by both his own family and the South African Ruperts. Harken booked an $8 million gain on the deal, only to write it all off later as a loss...
...Harken's few profitable ventures was its high-flying commodities trading arm. But suddenly in 1989 the division racked up a $17 million loss, prompting Quasha to shut down the operation. Insiders say the oil traders never had careful supervision, systematic controls or enough money in the bank to ride out a downturn...