Category: San Diego
Brent "The Enigma" Wilkes surfaces in attack ad
Free on bond, Brent “The Enigma” Wilkes is spending time at the poker table these days, but his scandalous past is featured in a new attack ad in Missouri’s Senate race.
Wilkes is referred to in the ad by Missouri Democrat Robin Carnahan he “defense contractor convicted of bribery” who provided private jet trips for her GOP opponent, Rep. Roy Blunt, the former House whip.
PoliticMo.com has the story here:
“One of the examples we touch on in the ad is the example of Brent Wilkes, the California defense contractor and lobbyist,” said Mindy Mazur, campaign manager for Robin Carnahan, in a conference call with journalists Wednesday. “Blunt – while he was there – helped whip the vote in favor of one of his companies.”
Mazur says, “Eight days later, Congressman Blunt received $14,000 from people associated with Brent Wilkes.”
While she says “he spent over 100,000 in legal fees related to the Wilkes case,” Mazur wasn’t sure if he had actually done anything illegal. “I would have to say the more we’ve learned about what congressman blunt’s been up to in washington, the more we’ve asked the same question [of legality].”
Wilkes was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2008 following his conviction on charges of bribery, money laundering and fraud. He was freed while his case is being appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Inside the CalPERS Sausage Factory
I’ve posted some court documents relating to a bribery investigation that involves some big names in the private equity world:
- CalPERS, the giant California pension;
- Leon Black’s Apollo Group
- Christopher Bower’s Pacific Corporate Group in La Jolla
- Gerry Parsky’s Aurora Capital Group.
Some background: California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s office in May sued former CalPERS CEO Federico Buenrostro Jr and placement agent and former Calpers board member Alfred Villalobos with fraudulent broker-dealer activities involving $4.8 billion in investments at the fund. (Read the lawsuit here.)
According to the lawsuit, Villalobos earned $47 million in commissions from clients including Black’s Apollo Management and Parsky’s Aurora Capital through corrupt relationships with individuals including CalPERS senior investment official Leon Shahinian, who recently left the pension:
When Villalobos was trying to persuade CalPERS to purchase a 10 percent equity interest in Apollo Global Management for $700 million in 2007 (as alleged in paragraphs 36-37 above), Shahinian accepted Villalobos’ invitation to travel by private jet to New York City to attend a fund-raising event on the evening of May 14, 2007 hosted by the Museum of Modern Art in honor of Leon Black (the “MOMA Event”), the founder and controlling shareholder of Apollo Global Management.
The trip include a private jet trip flight, a stay at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and limousine service. Total cost: more than $63,000.
Villalobos’ firm ARVCO billed Apollo for the trip. I’ve posted the bill here.
One month later, at a closed door hearing of the CalPERS investment board, Shahanian recommended the board invest in Black’s fund.
Also at the meeting, Pacific Corporate Group’s Chris Bower admits at the meeting that he had a business relationship with Villalobos, but CalPERS general counsel Peter Mixon said the relationship didn’t pose a conflict of interest because PCG didn’t stand to benefit from the pension’s investment in Apollo.
Here is a transcript of the hearing:
CalPERS Closed Investment Hearing June 18, 2007
Finally, Leon Shahinian’s deposition, in which he denies being bribed, is here.
Shahinian said that sometime in 2006 he told Leon Black that he would like to have a “more direct” relationship with Apollo, meaning that if Apollo had investment opportunities they should show them to CalPERS directly.
Q. After you had this conversation with Leon Black, were you discussing with him a potential opportunity for CalPERS to invest in Apollo regarding a distressed market debt opportunity?
A. Yes
Q. And did you — were you hoping during that conversation, in exploring that investment opportunity, to deal directly with Apollo without need for a placement agent?
A. I had approached Apollo on the idea of CalPERS investing a substantial amount of money in a distressed debt type fund. And after I had that initial conversation with Leon Black expressing CalPERS’ interest to invest in a fund like that, I learned Apollo hired Arvco to be the placement agent.
Q. Did that surprise you?
A. It did.
Q. Why?
A: I guess I didn’t understand why Apollo felt like they needed to hire a placement agent on something where CalPERS had explicitly indicated an interest in investing in.
San Diego attorney on Roger Clemens defense team
Michael Attanasio
The Houston Chronicle is out with a profile of San Diego attorney Michael Attanasio who’s joining former pitcher Roger Clemens’ defense team.
Padres general manager Kevin Towers tells the Chronicle he “couldn’t be happier” for both Attanasio and Clemens, a seven-time Cy Young award winner who pleaded not guilty today to lying to Congress when he testified in 2008 that he never used performance-enhancing drugs. Attanasio helped the Padres GM through the Mitchell Commission’s investigation of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.
The Chronicle reports:
Attanasio is well known in the Southern California community of baseball agents and executives because of friendships he built through his father, Tony, a trailblazing agent who represented Bobby Valentine, Dave Stewart, Davey Lopes and Ichiro Suzuki.
Moreover, he and his wife, former KPRC-TV reporter Susan Lennon, are close friends with Towers, baseball agent Barry Axelrod and their spouses.
In San Diego, federal prosecutors failed to convict for Attanasio’s client, Daniel Sulac, an Arthur Andersen accountant charged in the Peregrine Systems fraud when two trials in 2007 and 2008 both ended with deadlocked juries.
Attanasio served as a federal prosecutor in DC from 1991-1999.
Hat tip: WSJ law blog.
The Yacht Always Gets Them
A $1.8 million yacht purchased in Chula Vista figures in a U.S. bribery investigation of a senior official at Mexico’s state-run national electric utility.
The Mexican official, Nestor Moreno, received the yacht sold by the now-defunct South Shore Yacht Sales in Chula Vista.
South Shore Yacht Sales was registered to a Robin Goodman. County records show the business racked up tax liens in 2006 and 2008. An absentee judgement was recorded against Goodman and South Shore last year.
In addition to the yacht, Moreno allegedly received a $300,000 Ferrari Spider, and perhaps millions of dollars in cash in exchange for awarding a large contracts to firms in California and Texas, according to U.S. prosecutors.
Moreno’s name surfaced last week in U.S. District Court in Houston following the arrest of Angela Gomez Aguilar, a Mexican citizen.
Prosecutors say Gomez and her husband set up a company in Mexico that acted as an intermediary between Moreno and ABB Inc., the Swiss electrical engineering giant. Gomez also represented Lindsey Manufacturing of Azusa, California.
Moreno went on unpaid leave last week from Mexico’s national electricity monopoly, the Federal Electricity Commission, known as the CFE, after the allegations were published in the Houston Chronicle.
More Bank Failures
Pacific Western Bank of San Diego is picking up 11 new California branches north of LA and $770 million in fresh deposits following the failure of Los Padres Bank in Solvang, California.
As part of the deal, Pacific Western Bank has agreed to purchase essentially all of Los Padres’ assets (loans) of $870.4 million. The FDIC will assume up to 80 percent of the losses on most of Los Padres’ bad mortgages and commercial loans.
Also included in the acquisition was the Harrington Wealth Management subsidiary of Los Padres Bank, headquartered in Fishers, Indiana, which provides trust and investment management services to individuals and institutional clients.
Los Padres was another casualty of the bursting of the housing bubble and overleveraged mortgage-backed securities markets.
Federal bank regulators slapped Los Padres with a cease-and-desist order last year after the bank was deemed to be insufficiently capitalized.
The bank was a sinking ship, but it struggled to stay afloat by jettisoning bad loans and securities overboard and praying for better times ahead that never arrived.
Los Padres wasn’t the only victim of Friday’s bank failures. Rabobank, a Dutch bank that is one of the world’s biggest, is using its toehold in El Centro to expand even further into California by acquiring 23 branches and deposits totaling $777 million from two failed banks in Chico and Stockton.
Trump / Russia 