If you're George Bush you don't pay off your debts - you bail out, and make a profit on the deal to boot.
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US President George W. Bush speaks before signing the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 in the Old Executive Office Building in Washington.(AFP/Brendan Smialowski)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050420/photos_pl_afp/050420204243_i308h64o_photo0__________________
Bush's remarks today:
Our bankruptcy laws are an important part of the safety net of America. They give those who cannot pay their debts a fresh start. Yet bankruptcy should always be a last resort in our legal system. If someone does not pay his or her debts, the rest of society ends up paying them. In recent years, too many people have abused the bankruptcy laws. They've walked away from debts even when they had the ability to repay them. This has made credit less affordable and less accessible, especially for low-income workers who already face financial obstacles.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/04/20050420-5.html__________________
http://www.publicintegrity.org/bop2004/candidate.aspx?cid=1 Before going into business, however, Bush took a quick detour into politics. In 1978, he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Bush lost the election, but he won the confidence of relatives and family friends who agreed to support Arbusto, his oil-exploration firm. From 1979 to 1983, dozens of investors poured millions into the company and its successor, Bush Exploration.
Unfortunately for the investors Arbusto, however, turned out to be a financial failure. By April 1984, the company was $3.1 million in debt.In 1984, Bush sold his business to another Texas oil and gas exploration firm, Spectrum 7. As part of the deal, Bush became Spectrum 7's chief executive officer. But once again, business success eluded Bush and those around him. Two years after the merger, in 1986, world oil prices, whose decline had hurt many Texas oil producers, plunged even further.
Spectrum 7, deeply in debt, was in need of a bailout. Bush found one.In 1986 Harken Oil & Gas, an oil exploration company based in Irving, Texas, bought Spectrum 7. For his part Bush earned $600,000 from the initial sale. He also became a director and was paid as much as $120,000 in annual consulting fees and received stock warrants worth $131,250 even though he spent much of 1987 and 1988 working on his father's presidential campaign.
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http://www.columbusalive.com/2002/20020829/082902/08290208.htmlIn the mid 1980s, Arbusto hit hard times and merged with another desperate oil company to form Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation. Harken Energy Corporation, called by Time magazine “one of the most mysterious and eccentric outfits ever to drill for oil,” rescued Dubya’s failing enterprise in a stock swap with Spectrum 7 in 1986. Dubya received nearly $600,000 worth of Harken stock, joined its board of directors and became a $120,000-a-year “consultant” for Harken.
The next year, Harken stayed afloat through debt restructuring and was in the same sad financial shape as the earlier Spectrum 7 and Arbusto.But Harken dramatically reversed its ill fortune in January 1990. As Truell and Gurwin explain, “Harken Energy was awarded one of the most coveted oil deals in the world: a concession to drill for crude oil off the coast of Bahrain. The decision stunned many people in the industry. Harken was not only a small firm, it had never drilled outside the United States, nor had it drilled offshore. The only explanation that made sense to many oil executives, was that the Bahrain government wanted to do a favor for the family of President Bush.”
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Harken’s Bahrain deal sharply drove up the price of the company’s stock. By June 1990, Dubya had bailed and sold two-thirds of his Harken shares—a transaction he improperly failed to disclose to the Securities and Exchange Commission for several months. Dubya made $318,430 in profit on the sale. In August, Iraq invaded Kuwait and Harken stock fell by 25 percent, from $4 to $3 a share.
Harken creditors were threatening to foreclose unless debt payments were made, according to U.S. News and World Report. “Substantial evidence
to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits,” the magazine reported. Under U.S. law, insiders like Dubya are required to publicly report when they liquidate large blocks of stock. Bush reported his Harken stock sale eight months after the federal deadline, according to the Wall Street Journal.
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