Harken Energy

From 9/11 Encyclopedia:

Based in Houston, Texas, Harken Energy Corporation ("Harken") is an oil and gas exploration and production company whose corporate strategy calls for concentrating its resources on exploration and development of its domestic properties in the Gulf Coast regions of Texas and Louisiana..." Famoustexas.com described the history of Harken and George Bush: http://www.famoustexans.com/georgewbush.htm "..

In the West Texas energy business, George W. Bush started out researching who owned mineral rights. He later traded mineral and royalty interests and invested in prospects. He had started his own oil and gas company by 1978, taking $17,000 from his education trust fund to set up Arbusto Energy (->) (arbusto means Bush in Spanish). 

The company fell on hard times when oil prices fell. He made several attempts to revive the business, first by changing the company's name and later by merging with other companies. In 1983, Bush's company was rescued from failure when Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, bought it. 

Bush became chief executive officer. Harken Energy Corporation acquired Spectrum 7 in 1986, after Spectrum had lost $400,000. In the buyout deal, Bush and his partners were given more than $2 million worth of Harken stock for the 180-well operation. Bush became a director and was hired as a "consultant" to Harken. He received another $600,000 of Harken stock, and has been paid between $42,000 and $120,000 a year. By the spring of 1987, Harken was in need of cash. So Bush and his fellow Harken officials met with Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens, Inc., an investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas (Stephens contributed $100,000 to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and gave another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990.) Stephens arranged for Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to provide $25 million to Bush's company in return for a stock interest in Harken.

As part of the deal, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate tycoon and financier, joined Harken's board as a major investor.
Stephens, UBS, and Bakhsh each had ties to the infamous, scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
In 1990, Bush sold his remaining stock options and left the oil business. 

Writer Jack Colhoun revealed some details of that stock sale, referring to Bush by his childhood nickname "Junior": On June 22, 1990, George Jr. sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560-a cool 200 percent profit. The move was well timed. One week after Junior sold his stock, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and Harken stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait and 541,000 U.S. forces were deployed to the Gulf. Source: http://www.famoustexans.com/georgewbush.htm

On October 9th 2002 Reuters reported, that President Bush 's former oil firm Harken has formed a partnership with Harvard University that concealed the company's financial woes and may have misled investors, a student and alumni group said in a report . Harvard Watch, an independent group of students and alumni that monitors the school's investments, said the partnership raised troubling questions about the university's involvement in Harken when Bush was a board member. Source: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20021009/bs_nm/bush_harvard_dc_6

Boston Globe found memo: Harken-Board told before Bush stock sale http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/303/nation/Board_was_told_of_risks_before_Bush_stock_sale+.shtml 10/30/2002 Board was told of risks before Bush stock sale "The memo, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe, does not say directly whether Bush would face legal problems if he sold his stock. But it does lay out the potential for insider-trading violations by Bush and other members of the Harken board, and its existence raises questions about how thoroughly the SEC investigated Bush's unloading of $848,000 of his Harken stake to a buyer whose name has not been made public..."

More on Bush-Harken connections here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/wh2000/stories/bushmain072599.htm http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0228/ridgeway.php http://www.thedubyareport.com/ http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0203/S00035.htm http://www.rushlimbaughonline.com/articles/bushtrade1.htm http://www.opensecrets.org/bush/cabinet.asp http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york071702.asp http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,752706,00.html http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/INL110A.html http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2554/bush-admin.html http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/eliteprofiles/bushandharken.htm http://www.bushnews.com/ http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/303/nation/Board_was_told_of_risks_before_Bush_stock_sale+.shtm http://gwbushwatch.com/ http://deepcool.com/georgejr/ http://elitewatch.netfirms.com/ Compare SkipFox (->) : http://elitewatch.netfirms.com/HarkenGate.html