On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:59:31 -0500, Despot wrote:

On 1/25/2011 10:24 AM, Harryk wrote:
On 1/25/11 9:57 AM, I am Tosk wrote:

Harry is a thief. He helped bilk millions from the Uuilco retirees. We
can only guess who's money he's been spending on boats, decks, and gas
grills lately. Probably got his mits into all that payoff money Obama
gave the labor unions and auto manufacturers retirements fund payoffs...


Listen up, Scotty Ingersoll. I know you are dumber than a pile of dog
****, and I know you've seen this before, but obviously you didn't
understand it.

*No* retiree whose retirement was in any way secured by ULLICO's
investments of pension funds lost a penny of their retirement's value or
income because of alleged "insider" stock transactions.

Members of the ULLICO board of directors and a few very senior staff
people (and I was not part of either of those groups) were allowed to
purchase and sell shares of ULLICO stock. Some of them made serious
dinero over what could have been called insider stock trading, if ULLICO
had been a publicly owned company. But, ULLICO was and is a closed
corporation whose shares are closely held, mostly by those in the
pension fund business. Those who made those profits shouldn't have done
it, even though the firm's outside counsel said they could, and they had
to pay back the profits they made.

Be that as it may, none of that trading had anything to do with the
investments of retiree funds the company handled. Not a single dollar
was "bilked" from any "ULLICO retirees."

Another example of those evil, greedy corporations.

Oh wait, sorry, not evil. You work(ed) for them.


-----------------
Oh my, this narrative sure sounds different from yours. I guess it's a
matter of whose ox got gored:


Incorruptible labor legends Samuel Gompers and George Meany must be
spinning in their graves. After becoming the first president of the
American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886, Mr. Gompers founded the
Union Labor Life Insurance Co. (now the major subsidiary of the ULLICO
holding company) in 1925 in order to provide affordable insurance and
other financial services to union members. Mr. Meany, who became the
first president of the merged AFL-CIO in 1955 and served in that
capacity for a quarter-century, worked inexhaustibly to eliminate
corruption within the labor movement — which included expelling the
Teamsters from the AFL-CIO in 1957. That same year, the AFL-CIO adopted
a rule mandating the expulsion of any union official invoking the Fifth
Amendment to avoid scrutiny in a corruption case.

Last week, former ULLICO Chairman and CEO Robert Georgine took the Fifth
during a House Education and Workforce Committee hearing. The committee
is investigating a massive ULLICO insider-dealing scandal that has
engulfed many of organized labor’s most powerful bosses, including
Morton Bahr (president of the Communications Workers of America),
Douglas McCarron (general president of the carpenters) and Martin
Maddaloni (president of the plumbers and pipe-fitters). Mr. Georgine
himself headed the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department
from 1974-2000.

It was during the end of his tenure at the AFL-CIO that Mr. Georgine
enticed numerous of his ULLICO board colleagues and officers into a
secretive surefire get-rich-quick scheme that eventually netted the
self-dealers nearly $14 million in profits.

The ULLICO scandal can be traced to its early investment in Global
Crossing, the same once-high-flying-now-bankrupt telecom that turned a
$100,000 investment by Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry
McAuliffe into a $18 million pot of gold. Like Mr. McAuliffe, the labor
leaders cashed in their Global Crossing-related profits before the firm
went over the cliff, taking $50 billion worth of other shareholders’
investments with it.

In February 1997, the privately owned ULLICO invested $7.5 million in
the predecessor firm of Global Crossing, which went public in September
1998. By 1999, ULLICO’s investment in Global Crossing was worth well
over $1 billion, and it became the driving force behind ULLICO’s share
price, which was adjusted annually to reflect its net worth. With Global
Crossing’s stock price soaring throughout 1998 and 1999, ULLICO’s share
price would be adjusted accordingly, a process that occurred each May
based on ULLICO’s book value on Dec. 31.

In 1998 and 1999, Mr. Georgine secretly offered directors and officers
exclusive opportunities to purchase a total of 8,000 shares of ULLICO
stock before the annual adjustment of its stock price was made. (Union
pension funds, which held the vast majority of ULLICO’s stock, were
virtually shut out of the surefire get-rich-quick scheme.) In a Dec. 17,
1999 confidential memo, for example, Mr. Georgine offered the union
directors and officers the opportunity to purchase 4,000 shares of
ULLICO stock at $54 per share. Global Crossing closed at $52.56 (nearly
two-and-a-half times its year-earlier price of $22.50) on Dec. 16, 1999,
the day before Mr. Georgine wrote his confidential memo. Thus, it was a
certainty that ULLICO’s share price would soar when it was reassessed
two weeks later. As it happened, the ULLICO shares purchased for $54
jumped in value to $146 after the annual share-price adjustment.

In March 2000, however, Global Crossing’s stock price began to fall. By
December 2000, it had plummeted below $15 a share. Global Crossing’s
collapse would adversely affect ULLICO’s share price in a very big way.
(But, not to worry if you were a ULLICO officer or director.) During
December 2000 and January 2001, ULLICO repurchased more than 200,000
shares from its union-boss directors and officers at $146 per share.
Shares purchased by the bosses a year earlier at $54 were redeemed at
$146, yielding a profit of nearly $100 per share, even though Global
Crossing’s share price had plunged, necessitating a huge markdown in
ULLICO’s share price. Mr. Georgine netted a pre-tax profit of $840,000,
while Mr. McCarron collected $420,000. Mr. Maddaloni reportedly pocketed
nearly $250,000.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was a member of ULLICO’s board, but he
did not participate in the self-dealing. As the scandal progressed in
recent months, Mr. Sweeney played an important role, with mixed success,
in pressuring directors and officers to return their ill-gotten gains.
But where was he when the skullduggery was taking place? As a board
member, he almost certainly had to know about Mr. Georgine’s scheme long
before it became public during the spring last year.

Why didn’t Mr. Sweeney blow the whistle on this corruption? After all,
it was Mr. Sweeney who declared: “Enron exposed what many of us have
been saying: The boards of directors that are charged with acting in the
interest of investors and the public are riddled with greed,
self-dealing and plain selfishness.” As Damon Silvers, the counsel to
ULLICO’s new chairman and an associate general counsel of the AFL-CIO,
told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “Our company
was the victim of serious misconduct during the period from 1998 to
2002.” Where was ULLICO board member John Sweeney from 1998 through the
better part of 2002 as his fellow board members were looting his company
at the expense of union pension funds? Some answers would be welcome.

That impugns Harry's integrity. It can't be true.