Here’s more interesting back-n-forth from today’s Senate hearing about just who the investors were in those debt-concealing outside partnerships …
SEN. DORGAN: And let me go back to one more point, if I might, on LJM, one of the partnerships. In your report, on page 73, you said LJM had — excuse me — quote, “We understand that LJM-II ultimately had approximately 50 limited partners,” and then you mentioned some of them — Home Assurance, Arkansas Teachers Retirement, MacArthur Foundation, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Citicorp, First Union, Deutsche Bank, GE Capital, and Dresdner (sp), Kleinwort (sp), Bensen (sp). This 50 limited partners, is that a population that you’re certain of? Did you see the names of the 50 limited partners, or is that what you were simply told by someone?
[Dorgan then discusses the identity of the partners with Enron board member William Powers. Powers describes how much difficulty they had prying the partner list out of Andersen. Then Powers agrees to turn the document over to the committee.]
SEN. DORGAN: All right. Well, that’s a very small start. We have been, as you know, for a month and a half on this committee asking the corporation and asking all who are relevant to receive these requests that we need to understand what is the matrix of the investors — friends, businesses and others who were brought into this web, this complex web of partnerships — who are they? How much did they invest? Did they always make money on these investments? It looks to me like the corporation was backstopping everything with respect to these investments. So, we need to get that information, and at least today, at 1:30 in the afternoon, we will get the first 50 names, and we appreciate our ability to do that. And that comes courtesy of your copying a piece of information given by Arthur Andersen but then substantially — then subsequently taken back by them. So, we will hope that the rest of the names will not be quite so hard to receive or to achieve. And we’ll see.
So Dorgan and his staffers are clearly on to the mystery of the partners.
But let’s not miss the big story here. The MacArthur Foundation?!?!!? The sugar daddy of every good liberal activist and pressure group had a slice of LJM2? Does this mean the Economic Policy Institute and the American Prospect have to give back their fat grants? Where will it end?
