Rattner clams up
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Former car czar Steve Rattner was mum on several occasions last year when the Securities and Exchange Commission interviewed him under oath about his role in the messy New York State pension “pay to play” scandal, according to an upcoming report.
Rattner, the founder of Quadrangle Group, a private-equity firm, has been implicated in a kickback scheme that paid bribes to a middleman in return for his fund receiving wads of investment cash from New York’s robust $140 billion public pension fund.
He pleaded the fifth and refused to answer “many of the questions” the SEC asked him during a deposition into the matter last year, according to a story in the September Vanity Fair magazine.
The 58-year-old financial whiz is more forthcoming, however, when it comes to maintaining his innocence, according to the article, written by William Cohan, author of a book about the investment bank where Rattner once worked.
Soon after his crowning achievement as head of President Obama’s auto task force last year, the journalist-turned-dealmaker became enmeshed in two pay-to-play investigations involving Quadrangle, the New York Common Retirement Fund and political adviser Hank Morris — one by the SEC and the other by state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
Rattner, who would profit by earning investment fees on the pension money directed to his fund, proclaims “to anyone who will listen that he did nothing different from other private-equity executives in seeking investment dollars from state pension funds,” Cohan writes.
“This is never a good argument,” someone close to Cuomo’s investigation said, according to Cohan.
Quadrangle agreed to pay $7 million to end Cuomo’s investigation and $5 million to settle with SEC’s civil suit. Rattner “continues to fight” probes by the two agencies, Cohan said.
Rattner has been identified as the “former senior executive” at Quadrangle named in the SEC complaint. That executive met with the middleman and paid him cash in return for pension fund investments. Rattner has not, however, been charged with any wrongdoing.
Cohan also said Rattner has been “going about the business of trumpeting his success” as car czar in the hopes of re-igniting his tainted political career.
“He seems to think that he will soon be exonerated and that it is just a matter of time before he returns to Washington” to live in his $4.35 million Georgian mansion, which, the article claims, he bought in the hopes of eventually being named Treasury secretary.