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发帖数: 312 | 1 As many as a dozen members of Congress and their aides took part in insider
trading based on foreknowledge of market moving information on Capitol Hill,
disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff told CNBC in an interview.
Photo: Tom Williams | Roll Call | Getty Images
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Abramoff, who was once one of the wealthiest and most powerful lobbyists in
Washington before a corruption scandal sent him to federal prison for more
than three years, said that many of those members of Congress bragged to him
about their stock trading prowess while dining at the exclusive restaurant
he owned on Pennsylvania Avenue.
But Abramoff, whose black trench coat and fedora became one of the most
notorious images in recent Washington history after his fall from grace,
said he didn't play the stock market himself — he considered it an
inherently unfair "casino" in which the house had far more information than
the players. Abramoff made most of his fortune representing — and, as it
turned out, duping — Native American tribes rich with cash from casino
operations.
The former lobbyist said the amounts members of Congress earned trading off
their inside knowledge ranged from as little as $2,000 to, as much as "
several hundred thousand dollars," that was claimed by one member of
Congress.
Abramoff declined to name the members of Congress.
"It was more, 'Look at me, I'm a real great stock trader,'" Abramoff told
CNBC of the congressional bragging. "All of a sudden somebody from a
background maybe in law, maybe in some other unrelated business area, all of
a sudden is picking winners and losers in the market."
"I was making far more money than they were," Abramoff recalled. "So I wasn'
t as impressed as perhaps they thought I'd be."
At the time, Abramoff, who was involved in an extensive corruption ring,
didn't think much of it. But after years in prison to reflect on the culture
of corruption in Washington, Abramoff says he thinks trading based on
inside Congressional knowledge is wrong.
"These people should not be using whatever information they gain as public
servants to benefit themselves, any more than they should be taking bribes,"
he said.
Generally, however, legal analysts say that Wall Street insider trading laws
do not apply to Congress. As an open and public institution, the legal
assumption has long been that any member of the public can have access to
information about how Congress works. In practice, though, that's simply not
true, as powerful members of Congress come into contact daily with market-
moving tidbits. That gap between the law and the reality has made Capitol
Hill a virtual free-fire zone for insider trading. Over the years, academic
studies have found that members of the House of Representatives beat the
market by as much as six percent per year and members of the Senate do even
better than that.
RELATED LINKS
Current DateTime: 08:13:57 11 Nov 2011
LinksList Documentid: 45249858
Insider Trading Not Illegal if You're in CongressWhy Is Congress
Investigating Insider Trading?Insider Trading on Capitol Hill: Congressional
Democrats Do It Better
And Abramoff says everybody on the inside knew it. "I think it was pretty
widely known and it is pretty widely known that it is going on," he said.
Abramoff has been making the rounds, speaking with the media this week, to
promote his new book, "Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington
Corruption From America's Most Notorious Lobbyist," which went on sale
Monday.
Abramoff said that the most valuable type of information for Congressional
insider trading is held by congressional investigators who pry deeply into
corporate goings on. A particularly easy target is advance knowledge of the
announcement of an investigative hearing into a company.
"Hearings under almost every circumstance are going to have a bad impact on
a company," Abramoff said. "And so some staffers I've seen in the past
talking about the fact that, 'Oh, I'm gonna go out and short that company.'"
But the man who spread millions around the nation's capital said he didn't
like to invest his own money in the stock market. "I'd never really played
the stock market," he said. "I viewed it as a big gamble because of the fact
you don't have all the information you need. The casino has all the
information, and you don't." |
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