In breaking news this evening, Jim Petro, Ohio Attorney General and Republican candidate for governor, for the first time officially accused coin merchant Tom Noe of stealing at least $4 million in state workers' comp investment money in what he described as a "Ponzi scheme" to hide the lost funds.
From the Toledo Blade website
"Over the next several days leading into this week, we came to believe that there was an absolute theft of funds going on," Mr. Petro said at a news conference today.
The Dispatch's
website also covers this development:
Petro alleges that the investment never made money for the state and that Noe used the funds to pay off debts and perhaps to buy the expensive homes, boats and cars that he has been liquidating since charges arose.
"We're asserting those assets were purchased with stolen money," Petro said.
This is all well and good, but has Petro conveniently forgotten to mention that Noe gave a lot of this money to various political campaigns, almost entirely Republican, and that this seven years-worth of donations also needs to be recovered.
We have no idea whether Ohio law actually allows for the recover of dispersed funds in cases like this, but Petro seems to us to be outrageously negligent in not using his bully pulpit to at least make the ethical and moral argument to the President and the members of his own party to return this money given that theft occurred as far back as March 31, 1998, when Noe first co-mingled BWC's and his personal funds:
Petro says, "On that day when the $25 million was first placed in Tom Noe's hands, $1.375 million was immediately transferred to a business account, thereafter business or personal obligations were being paid with those proceeds."
And, let's remember that with Noe, we are not talking about someone who felt constrained to stay within legal donation limits. As now seems apparent from grand jury proceedings in Lucas County, he used political friends, allies and business partners to launder "his" money to the Bush-Cheney 2004 effort and possible others.
In other words, Petro should be assuming that Noe's "Ranger" status (having raised at least $100,000 for Bush) was accomplished with BWC funds, and proceed accordingly
Regarding the timing of today's charges, many insiders in Columbus believe that Petro was forced to come out strongly against Noe after an article in the today's Blade documented Noe's efforts to shift funds around before state officials stepped in two months ago. Again from the Blade's website:
The announcement came the same day that The Blade reported that there was a flurry of activity in the coin funds in the weeks leading up to the state's freezing of its assets on May 24, two days before Mr. Noe's attorneys acknowledged that up to $13 million of the state's money was missing.
While Petro's motivation may questioned, this new charge does help keep the Ohio GOP on the defensive and increases the pressure on Noe to cooperate with investigators who want to know who, if anyone, in Republican circles opened the investment opportunities for him and who coached him on the donation-laundering scheme.
[UPDATE:] As State Senator Marc Dann aptly
points out, Petro's announcement comes waaaaaay too late:
The time to take action for Petro was in 2000 when he was Ohio Auditor and the audit of the the Capital Coin Fund I (The first of 2 $25 million Dollar investments) showed serious problems with related party transactions.
[UPDATE II] The
Blade also apparently noticed that Petro failed to connect the dots in regard to using state money to fund Republican campaigns:
“On Day One, Tom Noe took $1.375 million and put it in his personal or his business account,” Mr. Petro said. Records show that Mr. Noe immediately began using the state’s money for his personal use, the attorney general said.
A week later, Mr. Noe and his wife, Bernadette, made $4,500 in contributions to then-Secretary of State Bob Taft’s campaign for governor.
In the three months after the $1.375 million transfer of state funds, Mr. Noe made thousands of dollars in political contributions, including an additional $2,500 to Mr. Taft, $2,000 to then-Gov. George Voinovich’s Senate campaign, and $500 to Mr. Petro’s campaign for re-election to the state auditor post he held before becoming attorney general.
When asked if he believed the state’s money had been used for campaign contributions, Mr. Petro said: “I don’t see that. I mean, clearly, Tom Noe personally contributed to campaigns and the source of his funds could very well be public money.”
But Mr. Petro connected the dots on Mr. Noe’s personal purchases, saying the Noes used “public money” to acquire millions of dollars worth of homes, cars, and boats.