That's Bill's Story and He's Stickin' To It!
Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he did nothing wrong in selling shares of HCA Inc. before a weak earnings report and pledged to cooperate with probes by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission.
``I acted properly,'' Frist, a Tennessee Republican, told reporters in Washington. ``I had no information about HCA or its performance that was not publicly available.'' . . .
``Senator Frist had no control over when the shares were sold through the mechanism of a blind trust,'' Call said.
Frist ordered the trustees to sell his shares on June 13, one month before the company said second-quarter profit would miss earnings estimates. The trustees notified Frist on July 1 that the shares had been sold.
Huh? He had no control, but he ordered the sale of HCA? And he had maintained since 2000 that he didn't know that he owned HCA? This is only the bare outline of this very weird story that Frist is telling (and that he'll probably get to tell to the SEC Enforcement Division, and to investigators from the US Attorney's office for the Southern District of New York). More later.
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Later: Interesting paragraphs from an MSNBC Report:
Blind trusts are designed to keep an arm’s-length distance between federal officials and their investments, to avoid conflicts of interest. But documents suggest that Frist knew quite a bit about his accounts from nearly two dozen letters from the trust administrators.
Frist, R-Tenn., received regular updates of transfers of assets to his blind trusts and sales of assets. He also was able to initiate a stock sale of a hospital chain founded by his family with perfect timing. Shortly after the sale this summer, the stock price dived.