Both Republican Senators from Georgia, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are mired in stock trading scandals. After Perdue hogged the headlines over the past days, today Kelly Loeffler is back in the focus. Via Rawstory:
[...]Loeffler argued that she and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, chair of the New York Stock Exchange, had complied with insider trading rules, which require executives of publicly traded companies to wall themselves off from market transactions by setting up a pre-planned investment schedule executed by a third-party broker. [...]
And as chairman of the NYSE, Sprecher must also abide by its rules, which define a conflict of interest as “when an individual’s private interest interferes in any way — or even appears to interfere — with the interests of the corporation as a whole.”
At the time of the trades, Loeffler sat on the Senate Agricultural Committee’s subcommittee on commodities, risk management and trade, which directly regulates her husband’s company. She recused herself after the trades became public, but still sits on the parent Agriculture Committee. (That committee also oversees her brother’s soybean operation.)
“If you worry about looking suspicious, you set this up in advance to say, ‘I have nothing to do with these trades,'” Marc Fagel, former director of the SEC’s San Francisco office, told Salon. [...]
Fagel concluded, “I’d counsel my clients hat you’d want to change your plan as infrequently as possible and make it as simple as possible. Generally the best practice is to have a regular sale, a set share amount and a set price. You want to have that new plan set up a quarter in advance.”
Loeffler and Sprecher’s trading appears to have fit that description for years. But this year they made major changes — perhaps to get tens of millions of dollars in extra liquidity in anticipation of funding Loeffler’s political activity. [...]
You should really read the whole story. With investigative journalists now combing through every available document, we can expect a lot more details to come out in the next days and weeks.
We need to get rid of terrible unelected Senator Kelly Loeffler and replace her with Reverend Raphael Warnock. If you can, please donate to the Defeat Kelly Loeffler Fund via ActBlue and support Democrats on the ground in Georgia.
You might also like to check out my other Georgia themed diary Georgia: Energize the Base MONEYBOMB