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Miers Led Law Firm Repeatedly Forced to Pay Damages For Defrauding Investors
By David Sirota
10/04/05 "Huffington
Post" -- -- In case anyone thought Harriet Miers
wasn't a corporate-shill-in-White-House-clothing, take a gander at
how Miers
did her best Ken Lay impression while heading a major Texas
corporate law firm. That's right, according to the 5/1/00
newsletter Class Action Reporter, Miers headed Locke,
Liddell & Sapp at the time the firm was forced to pay $22
million to settle a suit asserting that "it aided a client in
defrauding investors."
The details
of the case are both nauseating and highly troubling,
considering President Bush is considering putting Miers at the top
of America's legal system. Under Miers' leadership, the firm
represented
the head of a "foreign currency trading company [that] was
allegedly a Ponzi scheme." The law-firm admitted that it
"knew in March 1998 that $ 8 million in [the company's]
losses hadn't been reported to investors" but didn't tell
regulators.
This wasn't an isolated incident, either. The Austin
American-Statesman reported in 2001 that Miers' lawfirm was
forced to pay another $8 million for a similar scheme to defraud
investors. The suit, which dealt with actions the firm took under
Miers in the late 1990s, was again quite troubling. As the 9/20/00
Texas Lawyer reported, Miers' firm helped a now-convicted
con man "defraud investors and allowed the firm's [bank]
account to be used as a 'conduit.'" The suit said "money
from investors that went into the firm's trust account was
deposited into [the con man's] bank accounts and was used to pay
for his 'expensive toys.'"
If you think Miers wasn't involved in any of this -- think
again. Miers wasn't just any old lawyer at the firm. She was the
Managing Partner -- the big cheese. True, she could claim she had
no idea this was going on. But that would be as
laughable/pathetic/transparent as the Enron executives who made
the same ones after they ripped off investors.
I wrote
earlier today that Democrats must focus on the fact that Miers'
defining career experience up until her nomination was being a
Bush crony. These new details about her career only enhance that
case, in that it shows she is just like the other corrupt
corporate cronies like Enron's Ken ("Kenny
Boy") Lay that Bush has surrounded himself with over the
years. There is no room on the Supreme Court for people like Miers
who are clearly entirely compromised by partisan/corporate
loyalties -- loyalties that might make her an attractive candidate
to the a corrupt elitists who run today's Republican Party, but a
danger to the interests of ordinary Americans.
Copyright 2005 © HuffingtonPost.com
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