Saturday, May 30, 2009

Terry McAuliffe and Global Crossing

You should think very hard about allowing a Clintonista anywhere near the Governor's Mansion.

Investment questions dog McAuliffe in Va. gov race

In a governor's race that's all about jobs, Terry McAuliffe is facing questions about huge profits he made from a company that collapsed two years later, leaving 10,000 people unemployed.

The multimillionaire businessman and former Democratic National Committee chairman, a close friend of Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, is pledging to use his business savvy to land more jobs for his state than any of his fellow governors.
But since he entered the race in January, he's been dogged by questions about his investments in telecom giant Global Crossing. He faces two opponents in a June 9 primary.

In 1997, McAuliffe sank $100,000 into the Beverly Hills, Calif.-based startup's bold plan to link North America and Europe with a trans-Atlantic fiber optic cable, a super-fast conduit for voice, video and digital data.

"When I invested in Global Crossing, understand that it was a very risky deal," McAuliffe said in an Associated Press interview about his finances. His return was $8.1 million, mostly on the sale of 176,017 shares in 1999, the year Global Crossing stock peaked beyond $60 a share.

He could have made much more _ closer to the $18 million in some published reports _ had he sold all of his shares in 1999. Stock transaction records he provided to the AP show his last shares were sold in January 2002, after the company's stock had plunged to 14 cents per share. And, as McAuliffe notes, he was never a board member or officer of the company.

When Global Crossing filed for bankruptcy protection that year, investors lost $54 billion and 10,000 employees lost jobs. Even after 2008's spectacular Wall Street failures, Global Crossing's bankruptcy still ranks among the largest in U.S. history.
McAuliffe's most bitter primary rival is pounding him on it. State House Democratic Caucus leader Brian J. Moran's only television ad, which debuted last week, accuses McAuliffe of "working insider deals for himself."

Moran maintains the jobs lost at Global Crossing counter McAuliffe's claims that he can generate jobs for Virginia.


Business savvy my ass. Just another greedy, heartless, blood-sucking dhimmicrat who will do more damage to Virginia's economy than Timmy ever thought about doing.

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