Word: harkens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stock sale put him on the front pages and proved an embarrassment to his father's 1992 campaign. It also called attention to the little-known fact that in early 1990 Harken was awarded an exclusive contract from the government of Bahrain to drill for oil off that country's coast. With no offshore-drilling experience, Harken was an implausible choice. It was easy to assume that Bahrain was trying to curry favor with the President by giving business to a company tied to his son. Harken insiders say Bush actually opposed the deal (he was right; the wells turned...
Bush was stung, but not fatally. An SEC investigation concluded that he had done nothing to merit punishment. One month after he was cleared, Bush resigned from Harken's board--and declared for Governor...
...price crash, Bush had begun looking for a bigger fish to swallow his little one. His "bail-out strategy," as he calls it now, was to have Spectrum bought out by a publicly traded company so his investors would have a shot at getting their money back. Texas-based Harken Oil & Gas (now known as Harken Energy Corp.) had been buying up troubled independents on the cheap, and Spectrum fit the profile. In one six-month period before the acquisition, Spectrum lost $402,000. It was $3 million in debt, with no hope of attracting a dollar for new drilling...
What did the Harken bosses see in Spectrum? Some productive oil wells, to be sure, but mostly they saw the son of the sitting Vice President. "His name was George Bush. That was worth the money they paid him," says Harken founder Phil Kendrick, who sold the company in 1983 but stayed on as a consultant. Whatever the motivation, it was liberating for Bush. He had money and no day job, a combination that let him accept an offer that had been lurking in the back of his mind for more than a year--a job that would provide action...
...proposal lurked in Bush's mind throughout the hard times of 1985-86. He says he didn't think seriously about it until after the Harken deal, but some employees say it came up earlier. "He was ready to go," says Dickey. In summer 1987 the Bushes sold their house in Midland, loaded up the family wagon and drove to D.C. Bush says he had no idea what he'd do after the election...