Word: harkens
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...questions about his own past. He had joked his way through a 30-minute prep session earlier in the day, as if to assure his aides, Not to worry; he had this stuff under control. But he did not. "In the corporate world," he declared when pressed about how Harken Energy had hidden losses while he was on its board, "sometimes things aren't exactly black and white when it comes to accounting procedures." It was a defense that only an Arthur Andersen executive could love. The President whose wartime rhetoric runs to all or nothing was making a case...
...once the questions began, Bush looked like a 5-year-old losing a battle with an ice-cream cone on a summer day. His sale of stock as a director of Harken Energy in 1990, a once scrutinized deal that had faded into obscurity, was now alive in a much less forgiving environment. Bush dumped $848,000 worth of Harken stock two months before the company announced a $23.2 million loss; he was 34 weeks late in filing a form the Securities and Exchange Commission required to record the sale. Old news, the President said, noting that the SEC investigated...
Bush's business dealings were legal but on the wrong side of the new corporate morality he is now preaching. How could the President chastise executives for doing the same kinds of things he did as a director, without apology? Bush received subsidized loans from Harken to buy company stock--a practice he now wants to ban. In 1989 Harken concealed losses by selling most of a subsidiary to an off-the-books entity controlled by company insiders. Bush was on the audit committee, which, at least in theory, approved the deal. It's the same tactic used by Enron...
When Bush went into the oil business in Midland, Texas, he didn't discover enough of the stuff to strike it rich. He merged his first company, Arbusto (Spanish for "bush"), into one called Spectrum 7 in 1984 and then led the struggling firm into Harken's embrace in 1986. In exchange for his 15% stake in Spectrum, Bush got Harken stock worth some $320,000; he was also hired as an $80,000-a-year consultant. Harken founder Phil Kendrick explained it this way: "His name was George Bush," he told TIME. "That was worth the money they paid...
...when Bush was unloading those shares for $848,000, Harken was sliding down. The company, which owned everything from drill rigs to gas stations, was losing millions of dollars trading oil on the commodities market. With its balance sheet deteriorating, Harken devised a sale of 80% of a chain of gas stations, Aloha Petroleum in Hawaii, to an entity that included the company's chairman and another director. Harken recorded a gain of $7.9 million to offset other losses and finished the year $3.3 million in the red--bad, but far better than the reality...