Obama's private equity alums
For all the fire directed at the private equity world this week – from Mitt Romney’s opponents in both parties – few major politicians can claim to have their hands clean when it comes to the financial services industry, and President Barack Obama is no exception.
Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry found that out the hard way: Gingrich took criticism for attacking Bain Capital while having one served on the board of Forstmann Little, while Perry came in for a grilling from Laura Ingraham over the thousands of dollars in campaign donations he’s taken from private equity executives.
And Obama may have some private equity questions of his own to answer, having both taken donations from the industry and appointed a number of private equity veterans to his administration.
The most prominent among them is Jack Lew, the new White House chief of staff, who was previously a managing director at Citi Alternative Investments. Nancy-Ann DeParle, a deputy chief of staff who helped lead the president’s health care reform effort, was a managing director at CCMP Capital.
Jeffrey Goldstein, the recently-departed undersecretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance, was a managing director at Hellman & Friedman before he joined the administration. He’s returning to the private equity firm now that he has resigned. Former auto czar Steve Rattner came out of the world of private equity before briefly working with the administration, and defended Bain Capital from attacks in a POLITICO op-ed this week.
A number of Obama advisory board members and lower-profile appointees have also had private equity on their resumes. Mark Gallogly of Centerbridge Partners, and formerly of the Blackstone Group, was on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Richard Parsons, the former Time Warner executive on the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, is also linked to Providence Equity Partners Inc. Walter Jones, the U.S. executive director of the African Development Bank, was a senior private equity executive with Gravitas Capital Advisors.
There are other private equity connections on the President’s Management Advisory Board, the Board for International Food and Agriculture Development, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council and the Advisory Committee of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.
In light of that, one private equity insider suggested to me in an email: “If President Obama plans to campaign against Mitt Romney and the alleged evils of private equity, then he will need to start by purging the ranks of his own administration.”
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