Petrelis Files

Salon: Bush Family, Ports Deal, Carlyle Group (NYT Link?)

Do you happen to know Salon writer Joe Conason? If you do, please put me in touch with him.

He's written a fascinating piece for Salon about the Bush administration's controversial effort to award a contract to the Dubai Ports World company and allow to operate several American seaports. Conason reports on the extensive links between the Carlyle Group and many tentacles of the Bush family's interests.

From Salon:

> Consider the Carlyle Group, the huge, politically wired private equity firm that has employed both the president and his father -- and from which the members of the Bush family and their closest associates, such as former Secretary of State James Baker III, have profited handsomely in recent years. With its sole Middle East office headquartered in Dubai, Carlyle has managed to attract substantial funding from the UAE government, which controls most of the tiny nation's oil wealth and channels that money into foreign investments.

> Last year, to cite only the most recent example, Carlyle's newest buyout fund won an infusion of at least $100 million from the Dubai Investment Corp. -- another state-owned outfit created by the ruling families to reinvest the enormous inflows of capital from rising oil prices and oil consumption. If that individual deal with Carlyle represented only a small fraction of the Emirates' investments, the upside potential of the relationship could be far greater in the future. The directors of Dubai Investment expect to invest as much as $5 billion every year for a long time to come.

> No doubt Carlyle will ardently bid to manage a slice of those billions -- and the president surely understands that maintaining good relations with the Emirates will enhance the prospects of the family's favorite equity firm. But to deprive Dubai of its $6.8 billion ports acquisition might well have the opposite effect. For a company that trades on its political influence as well as its business acumen, such incidents can be pivotal.

I want to contact Conason to make him aware of something. William E. Kennard, a managing director for the Carlyle Group, also sits on the board of the New York Times Company. Interesting that Kennard joined both companies in the same year, 2001. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it does raise at least one of my eyebrows that someone during a twelve-month period became a high-ranking director at these two highly-influential institutions.

Kennard also once was the head of the Federal Communications Commission, during the Clinton years.

I also want to ask Conason to do a LexisNexis search of New York Times articles since Kennard joined the paper's board of directors, just to see what the Times has published during that time on the Carlyle Group.

There's no reason to think the Times has in any way given favorably biased coverage to the investment firm, or that the paper has failed to mention, when appropriate and necessary, the link between Kennard/Carlyle Group and the Times.

But my curiosity is piqued and I don't have access to LexisNexis services, so if anyone can connect with Conason, I'd sure appreciate the favor.