Word: vesco
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...aspects. The circles of involvement spread from agency to agency, official to official. The Securities and Exchange Commission was afflicted last week when G. Bradford Cook, 36, its chair man for just 2½ months, resigned be cause of the "web of circumstance" that involved him in the Vesco case (see BUSINESS). A federal grand jury in New York, which had indicted Robert Vesco, John Mitchell and Maurice Stans, said Cook deleted from an SEC complaint against Financier Vesco all references to the $250,000 that Vesco donated to the campaign fund headed by Stans...
What brought Cook's tenure to an ignominious end was his involvement in the SEC'S investigation of Financier Robert Vesco, whom the agency accuses of looting securities from the I.O.S. mutual-fund empire started by Bernard Cornfeld. For weeks rumors circulated that Cook, as the commission's general counsel, had deleted from an SEC complaint any mention of Vesco's $200,000 cash contribution to President Nixon's re-election campaign. Supposedly, Cook did that at the urging of former Attorney General John Mitchell, then director of the Committee for the Re-Election...
Costa Rica has the potential of becoming a kind of financial Shangri-La for Vesco, and he has taken pains to win over some of the country's most powerful politicians. According to the SEC, one of the I.O.S. funds, IIT, has made an unsecured loan of $2,150,000 to Sociedad Agricola y Industrial San Cristobal, a firm founded and still partly owned by Costa Rican President José ("Don Pepe") Figueres. Says Figueres: "Vesco's investments here are very secure and creative. I can't understand the fuss." I.O.S.'s Fund of Funds allegedly...
Local businessmen view Vesco's bulging money bags with a nervous ambivalence-as both a promise of much-needed investments and a threat to their control of local enterprises. Lately, Vesco's name has been linked with almost every sizable business deal in the country. Despite Vesco's denials, rumors persist that through various fronts he has bought a gas station network from Gulf Oil Corp., a big piece of San Jose's Royal Dutch Hotel, the El Molina coffee plantation, and a share of the anti-Figueres newspaper, La Nacion. There even are wild rumors...
Meanwhile, Vesco goes on establishing himself in Costa Rica. Crateloads of furniture have arrived in San José from I.O.S. offices in France. Vesco has been granted a provisional Costa Rican passport and, according to Figueres, he intends to renounce U.S. citizenship. He has rented a chalet in a wooded area on the outskirts of San José and parks his private plane -a Boeing 707-at the San José airport. Yet for Vesco, the relentlessly ambitious son of a Detroit auto worker, San José, with no stock market and less than a dozen banks, is a pale...