Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [4]
Bush walked away from the Texas “awl bidness” in 1990 with almost a million in cash—after a career during which he lost more than $3 million of other people’s money. Here he was advocating “a new ethic” on Wall Street despite his own business dealings, which couldn’t even pass the “old ethic” test. The earlier dealings had been the subject of a pro forma investigation directed by the man President Bush the Elder appointed head of the SEC, and the investigation itself was conducted by a man who had worked as GeeDubya’s personal lawyer before joining the SEC. A few of GeeDubya’s deals, particularly a series of critical bailouts of his ever-sinking oil-field ventures, are truly astonishing—not just because of the volume of dollars flowing out of Northeastern banks and disappearing in Texas but because the transactions made little or no economic sense.
A company balance sheet can be misleading.
There was leaseholds, there was momentum.
—CANDIDATE GEORGE W. BUSH ON PHILIP UZIELLI’S
$1 MILLION BAILOUT OF ARBUSTO
One of Bush’s white knights, a friend of the Bush family consigliere* James Baker III, is so interesting that to leave him out is the journalistic equivalent of a breach of fiduciary responsibility. Philip Uzielli’s $1 million cash-for-trash deal in 1982 allowed GeeDubya to keep his company alive long enough to sell it to Spectrum 7, then to sell the again-sinking Spectrum 7 to Harken and then to unload his sinking Harken stock—just before the bad news became public—for a large enough profit to buy 2 percent of the ownership of a baseball franchise that made him $15 million in less than nine years. Philip Uzielli (“Uzi” to GeeDubya) is a Panamanian businessman and Princeton classmate of James Baker. In 1982 he was listed as CEO of Panama’s Executive Resources and as a director of Harrow Corporation and Leigh Products. As we reported in Shrub, when GeeDubya’s company, Arbusto, was in a terminal cash crunch, Uzi showed up and paid $1 million for 10 percent of a failing company valued at $382,376, according to the company’s financial statements. In other words, Uzielli paid $1 million for $38,200 in equity. Bush had changed the name of Arbusto to Bush Exploration after his father became vice president. (GeeDubya says arbusto is the Spanish word for “bush,” although Cassell’s Spanish/English Dictionary translates it as “shrub,” the source of one of GeeDubya’s nicknames.) By the time of the corporate name change, Arbusto had drilled so many dry holes that West Texas oilmen called it “are-busted.” Mr. Uzielli lost his entire $1 million investment but later told reporters he didn’t regret it. He described his investment with Bush as “a losing wicket” but said “it was great fun.” What a sport.
Arbusto was not an oil company so much as it was a tax write-off company, taking advantage of the IRS tax-code provision that allowed investors to deduct up to 75 percent of their losses in the oil business. Bush didn’t strike oil, he struck money from friends of his daddy. After the Uzielli bailout Bush Exploration was acquired by Spectrum 7. Spectrum 7 was owned by William DeWitt, Jr., son of the owner of the Cincinnati Reds. DeWitt couldn’t pay Bush for what remained of Bush Exploration, so he sort of took him in, made him CEO and a director, paid him $75,000 a year and $120,000 in consulting fees, and gave him 1.1 million shares of Spectrum 7 stock.
Two years later Spectrum 7 had lost $400,000 in six months and was $3 million in debt. So Harken stepped in. The Texas-based company bought Spectrum 7 for $2 million in Harken stock. Of the $2 million, $224,000 in shares went