Word: knighting
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...Knight was persistent. Two years later, according to internal Molten documents, Knight began working on ways to court Molten's largest potential customer in Mexico--the state-owned oil company, Pemex. To prove it could do the work, Molten set out to perform a "feasibility" plan. And to engage Mexico's top environmental officials, it asked U.S. Ambassador Jim Jones, an old Gore ally in Congress, to hold a luncheon at his Mexico City residence. One corporate E-mail to Knight thanked him for "helping us" with Jones and a U.S. agency that granted Molten $280,000 to help finance...
...Knight did develop a taste for foreign policy while on Molten's payroll. With the signing of NAFTA and its environmental sidebars in 1993, the firm saw a big market in Mexico for its toxic waste-eating machine. It also saw a big marketing opportunity in the Vice President's visit to Mexico in December of that year. Two days before the trip, Knight wrote Gore's counsel Jack Quinn suggesting that Gore put in a good word for the company with President Carlos Salinas regarding a cleanup job that was the "type of project where U.S. technology can promote...
...Knight moved next to the Commerce Department, where he escorted Molten officials for a briefing by trade officials on Mexican environmental-cleanup opportunities the same year. In July 1996, Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor called Pemex's director general to plug the company and its bid for toxic-waste work in Mexico. Pemex has indicated a strong interest in the project but has yet to announce a decision...
Congressional investigators are also looking into swings in Molten's stock prices and the timing of Knight's own stock sales--and whether they are tied to favorable action by the government that he helped facilitate. Separately, Molten's shareholders have filed five class-action lawsuits alleging, among other things, that the company misrepresented the commercial viability of its waste-processing technology to investors and that several of its officers and directors cashed in their shares a year ago at artificially inflated prices, using insider information...
Molten's story intrigues investigators because it also seems to hint at a larger pattern. Records show that Knight lobbied Grumbly in Lockheed Martin's fight to hold on to its $40 million-a-year fee to manage an Oak Ridge, Tenn., research facility. Lockheed got an extra five years of work in two Energy Department awards that coincided with big D.N.C. donations--$15,000 given 13 days before a two-year extension in 1995, and $125,000 within weeks of the 1996 decision to add three years more to the contract. A Lockheed spokesman denied any link...