Sen. Kelly Loeffler Dumped Millions in Stock After Coronavirus Briefing

L. Markay, W. Bredderman, & S. Bordy
thedailybeast.com
Updated 20 March 20

The Senate’s newest member sold off seven figures’ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) reported the first sale of stock jointly owned by her and her husband on Jan. 24, the very day that her committee, the Senate Health Committee, hosted a private, all-senators briefing from administration officials, including the CDC director and Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on the coronavirus.

“Appreciate today’s briefing from the President’s top health officials on the novel coronavirus outbreak,” she tweeted about the briefing at the time.

That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies valued at between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has fallen by more than half since then, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average overall has shed approximately 10,000 points, dropping about a third of its value.

It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales. One of Loeffler’s two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.

The info is here.

Burr moves to quell fallout from stock sales with request for Ethics probe

Jack Brewster
politico.com
Originally posted 20 March 20

Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Friday asked the Senate Ethics Committee to review stock sales he made weeks before the markets began to tank in response to the coronavirus pandemic — a move designed to limit the fallout from an intensifying political crisis.

Burr, who chairs the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, defended the sales, saying he “relied solely on public news reports to guide my decision regarding the sale of stocks" and disputed the notion he used information that he was privy to during classified briefings on the novel coronavirus. Burr specifically name-checked CNBC’s daily health and science reporting from its Asia bureau.

“Understanding the assumption many could make in hindsight however, I spoke this morning with the chairman of the Senate Ethics Committee and asked him to open a complete review of the matter with full transparency,” Burr said in a statement.

Burr, who is retiring at the end of 2022, has faced calls to resign from across the ideological spectrum since ProPublica reported Thursday that he dumped between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 different transactions — a week before the stock market began plummeting amid fears of the coronavirus spreading in the U.S.

The info is here.

Ethics working group to hash out what kind of company service is off limits

Chris Marquette
www.rollcall.com
Originally published July 22, 2019

A House Ethics Committee working group on Thursday will discuss proposed regulations to govern what kind of roles lawmakers may perform in companies, part of a push to head off the kind of ethical issues that led to the federal indictment of Rep. Chris Collins, who is accused of trading insider information while simultaneously serving as a company board member and public official.

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House Resolution 6 created a new clause in the Code of Official Conduct — set to take effect Jan. 1, 2020 — that prohibits members, delegates, resident commissioners, officers or employees in the House from serving as an officer or director of any public company.

The clause required the Ethics Committee to develop by Dec. 31 regulations addressing other prohibited service or positions that could lead to conflicts of interest.

The info is here.

How Wilbur Ross Lost Millions, Despite Flouting Ethics Rules

Dan Alexander

Forbes.com

Originally published December 14, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

By October 2017, Ross was out of time to divest. In his ethics agreement, he said he would get rid of the funds in the first 180 days after his confirmation—or if not, during a 60-day extension period. So on October 25, exactly 240 days after his confirmation, Ross sold part of his interests to funds managed by Goldman Sachs. Given that he waited until the last possible day to legally divest the assets, it seems certain that he ended up selling at a discount.

The very next day, on October 26, 2017, a reporter for the New York Times contacted Ross with a list of questions about his ties to Navigator, the Putin-linked company. Before the story was published, Ross took out a short position against Navigator—essentially betting that the company’s stock would go down. When the story finally came out, on November 5, 2017, the stock did not plummet initially, but it did creep down 4% by the time Ross closed the short position 11 days later, apparently bolstering his fortune by $3,000 to $10,000.

On November 1, 2017, the day after Ross shorted Navigator, he signed a sworn statement that he had divested everything he previously told federal ethics officials he would. But that was not true. In fact, Ross still owned more than $10 million worth of stock in Invesco, the parent company of his former private equity firm. The next month, he sold those shares, pocketing at least $1.2 million more than he would have if he sold when he first promised to.

The info is here.

GOP Lawmakers Buy Health Insurance Stocks as Repeal Efforts Move Forward

Lee Fang
The Intercept
Originally posted July 6, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The issue of insider political trading, with members and staff buying and selling stock using privileged information, has continued to plague Congress. It gained national prominence during the confirmation hearings for Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, when it was revealed that the Georgia Republican had bought shares in Innate Immunotherapeutics, a relatively obscure Australian biotechnology firm, while legislating on policies that could have impacted the firm’s performance.

The stock advice had been passed to Price from Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., a board member for Innate Immunotherapeutics, and was shared with a number of other GOP lawmakers, who also invested in the firm. Conaway, records show, bought shares in the company a week after Price.

Conaway, who serves as a GOP deputy whip in the House, has a long record of investing in firms that coincide with his official duties. Politico reported that Conaway’s wife purchased stock in a nuclear firm just after Conaway sponsored a bill to deal with nuclear waste storage in his district. The firm stood to directly benefit from the legislation.

Some of the biggest controversies stem from the revelation that during the 2008 financial crisis, multiple lawmakers from both parties rearranged their financial portfolios to avoid heavy losses. In one case, former Rep. Spencer Baucus, R-Ala., used confidential meetings about the unfolding bank crisis to make special trades designed to increase in value as the stock market plummeted.

The article is here.

Five Doctors Settle SEC Insider Trading Charges

Reuters Health Information
Originally published July 10, 2012

Five doctors have agreed to pay $1.9 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission civil charges that they conducted insider trading in shares of a medical professional liability insurer that was preparing to be sold.

The SEC said Apparao Mukkamala routinely tipped the other doctors in 2010 about confidential details of the sale process for American Physicians Capital Inc ("APCapital"), where he had been chairman at the time.

It said the other doctors bought nearly $2.2 million of the East Lansing, Michigan-based company's stock between April 30 and July 7, 2010, based on the tips, and that Mukkamala himself bought shares through a charitable organization where he was president.

The entire story is here.