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© St. Petersburg Times, published January 19, 2002
Cheney pushed to get debt paid
WASHINGTON -- The White House did some digging into old Clinton administration files Friday to make the case that it was appropriate for Vice President Dick Cheney to help campaign supporters at Enron collect a $64-million debt from India.
Three of President Clinton's commerce secretaries -- Ron Brown, Mickey Kantor and William Daley -- also advocated for the Dabhol energy project that Enron, General Electric and Bechtel Corp. undertook in India, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
President Bush himself would have been within bounds to raise the issue during his Nov. 9 meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had advisers not scrapped the agenda item because it "did not rise to the president's level," Fleischer said.
Ethics watchdogs in the White House counsel's office did see a problem if economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey should advocate for the project.
Enron was looking for help in pushing the Maharashtra State Electricity Board to settle the $64-million debt Enron claimed for building a giant power plant in Dabhol, India, a project dating to 1992 and insured by the taxpayer-funded Overseas Private Investment Corp.
Lindsey, who previously earned $50,000 as an Enron consultant, received an ethics ruling from White House lawyers last year advising him to have "no direct involvement in the Dabhol plant as a result of his previous holdings with Enron," Fleischer said.
The White House defended its handling of the long-running Dobhal case after the New York Daily News reported on government e-mails it obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Those e-mails revealed publicly for the first time that Cheney "mentioned Enron" in his June 27 meeting with Sonia Gandhi, president of India's opposition Congress Party.
Fleischer confirmed Friday that Cheney asked Gandhi "about the status of the project."
With the Enron collapse wiping out at least $1-billion from the retirement funds of teachers, firefighters and other public employees, states are joining a class-action suit to win back some money from the energy trading company.
Florida's Board of Administration, which oversees the state's $94-billion pension fund, recently filed papers in a Texas federal court seeking to be one of two lead plaintiffs in the suit.
New York City's pension fund joined Florida in seeking to lead the legal battle to recover money lost after the company's stock plunged in the wake of disclosures that the company had kept hundreds of millions of dollars in debt off its books.
Florida's $94-billion state employee pension fund lost $325-million when it was forced to dump 7.5-million Enron shares in the aftermath of Enron's Dec. 2 bankruptcy.
Attorneys general in Georgia, Ohio and Washington state also have asked to be the lead plaintiffs in the suit.
A federal judge in Houston will decide who will lead the suit, but there isn't a timetable for when that will be decided. Briefs in the case are due next week.
AUSTIN, Texas -- Former Montana Gov. Mark Racicot assumed the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee on Friday, assuring GOP leaders that he will no longer do the kind of lobbying that he did for energy giant Enron before its collapse.
But Racicot refused to sever his ties with the Houston law firm Bracewell & Patterson, for whom he served as an Enron lobbyist last year. He will continue to be paid by the firm -- more than the $150,000 annual salary he otherwise would receive from the Republican Party if he left his job -- and will continue to do unspecified work for a group of clients he refused to identify.
Critics complain that Racicot's position as head of the Republican Party gives him such inside access to top government officials that he should not continue to represent powerful private clients lest he betray the public's interest in neutral government by instead possibly pressing the interests of his private patrons.
Racicot, 53, said that he took the GOP post out of devotion to President Bush and that the same loyalty would prevent him from doing anything unethical that would embarrass Bush. "I'm going to do nothing that in any way would even suggest something adverse to his best interest," he said.
AUSTIN, Texas -- Texas' top utility regulator, a former Enron Corp. executive, has quit amid investigations into the company's financial meltdown.
Max Yzaguirre told Public Utility Commission staff that his resignation was effective Friday, PUC spokesman Terry Hadley said.
Yzaguirre did not immediately return a telephone call from the Associated Press but was expected to issue a statement later.
Yzaguirre led the agency in its move to deregulate the electricity market, an area of great interest to Enron. State lawmakers approved the electric deregulation bill in 1999.