As if the victims of Bernard Madoff had not suffered enough, the Justice Department has now inflicted on them the albatross of Richard C. Breeden. Breeden was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the term of President George H.W. Bush (1989-1993), in which capacity he claims a myriad of pettifogging advances in corporate governance rules. But he is perhaps best remembered for the SEC’s decision, under his watch, not to charge the then president’s son, George W. Bush, for selling $848,000 of stock in Harken Energy, shortly before an announcement of a larger than expected loss for that company and the erosion of its share price over the next year of 70 per cent, though it later recovered that decline. The issue is not so much whether the future president got a free pass for an insider sale as whether Breeden had spared George W. Bush the usual frenzied legal assault because his father was Breeden’s boss. As one who has been subjected to the full panoply of Breeden’s misplaced fervor, I would certainly not reproach him this uncharacteristic act of restraint, and would not begrudge the future president the benefit of it; my impression is that Breeden did the right thing in that case, if for the wrong reasons. For most of his career, few who came into his cross-hairs were as fortunate. More in the Huffington Post Canada here.
