The Carlyle Group fell short relative to its British peers on transparent reporting. Dow Jones reported, "the firm does not give a breakdown of its own accounts, and -except for a handful of case studies- fails to provide details on turnover, profits, employees and management of its portfolio companies."
That sounds eerily familiar to another opaque report involving the politically connected private equity underwriter (PEU), the Bush White House Lessons Learned report on Hurricane Katrina. Frances Townsend crafted a similarly incomplete analysis. Except for a few hero stories, her tome failed to delineate responsibility for hospital patient evacuations from dead facilities. Nor did it assess how first responders performed.
This enabled the hospital with the largest number of patient deaths to get not one mention in the Bush analysis. LifeCare Hospital lost 24 patients from Katrina's sideswipe of New Orleans. The Carlyle Group closed on its purchase of LifeCare just weeks before landfall.
That's ancient history, however nonpublic. But reporting is on the front burner for foreign corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange and for sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), foreign government owned investment corporations flush with your gas money profits.
Guess who's part owned by the largest sovereign wealth firm in the world? An Abu Dhabi investment company purchased 7.5% of Carlyle last fall.
That same PEU recently sent a representative to testify before Congress on SWF's. I imagine they said some nice things about their new part owner.
The federal government already proved it can be as opaque as the groups it purports to monitor. Layers of opaqueness grow when stacked upon each other. Trying to see through Abu Dhabi, Carlyle, and LifeCare produces little light. Why am I not surprised?
That sounds eerily familiar to another opaque report involving the politically connected private equity underwriter (PEU), the Bush White House Lessons Learned report on Hurricane Katrina. Frances Townsend crafted a similarly incomplete analysis. Except for a few hero stories, her tome failed to delineate responsibility for hospital patient evacuations from dead facilities. Nor did it assess how first responders performed.
This enabled the hospital with the largest number of patient deaths to get not one mention in the Bush analysis. LifeCare Hospital lost 24 patients from Katrina's sideswipe of New Orleans. The Carlyle Group closed on its purchase of LifeCare just weeks before landfall.
That's ancient history, however nonpublic. But reporting is on the front burner for foreign corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange and for sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), foreign government owned investment corporations flush with your gas money profits.
Guess who's part owned by the largest sovereign wealth firm in the world? An Abu Dhabi investment company purchased 7.5% of Carlyle last fall.
That same PEU recently sent a representative to testify before Congress on SWF's. I imagine they said some nice things about their new part owner.
The federal government already proved it can be as opaque as the groups it purports to monitor. Layers of opaqueness grow when stacked upon each other. Trying to see through Abu Dhabi, Carlyle, and LifeCare produces little light. Why am I not surprised?
