We started to send out word connecting the dots between Macquarie, Cintra, the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani and Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani last spring. Finally, the mainstream press is starting to look into Giuliani’s crooked deals that involve the Texas Governor and many of the special interests that dominate Texas. It’s clear Cintra and Macquarie are trying to buy themselves a U.S. President!

_____________________________________

Below is an excerpt from Vanity Fair, December 2007, on the Macquarie, Cintra, Bracewell & Giuliani, and Trans Texas Corridor connection – Link to full article here.

“Finally, last March, Giuliani managed to sell Giuliani Capital Advisors for an undisclosed sum to a fast-growing Australian bank called Macquarie Group. In a New York Times article, an analyst suggested that Macquarie might have paid as much as $76 million for it. Another analyst scoffs at that and says the price was closer to $10 million—essentially what Giuliani had paid for it. A source at Macquarie, while not confirming the lower figure, allows that the higher figure is “wildly” off. (Hess says, “We don’t comment on fees or compensation.”)

Why would an Australian colossus like Macquarie buy a money-losing U.S. investment bank? Perhaps because Macquarie is making inroads—literally—in the U.S., acquiring the leases on state highways and operating them as toll roads, in Indiana and Illinois, with more states to follow. The toll-road business is highly controversial and involves politics right up to the top. It can’t hurt to have helped out a man who might be the next president. (A Macquarie spokesperson says the only reason for the purchase of G.C.A. was “new sectors and new locations for us,” and that Giuliani “was not involved in discussions for acquisition of G.C.A. by Macquarie.”)

Even before the deal, there had been only one degree of separation between Macquarie and Giuliani. Macquarie’s partner in a $3.8 billion Indiana toll road is a Spanish company called Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. Cintra, in turn, is represented by a Texas law firm once known as Bracewell & Patterson, now called Bracewell & Giuliani.

Legal Eagles

For Giuliani, a law firm was the third leg of the stool. Not only did it fit right in with his other businesses; for the former prosecutor, appending his name to a large, established firm was a dream come true. But one in Texas?

The business marriage worked for the reason marriages often do: each partner could help the other. At 64, Bracewell managing director Patrick Oxford had accomplished a lot. A genial Republican with close ties to Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn, among other Texas stalwarts, he prides himself on his role in heading up his party’s delegation of lawyers in Broward County, Florida, in the aftermath of the 2000 election. Four years later, he took his strike force to Ohio and helped keep the tipping-point state in the Republican column. Oxford, then, had done about as much as any individual in the United States to determine the outcomes of the last two presidential elections. Yet Bracewell was overshadowed by larger Texas firms such as Vinson & Elkins, alma mater of former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, and Baker Botts, where former secretary of state James Baker presides. Giuliani would boost Bracewell’s profile, especially if he ran for president—and won.

To all who asked, Giuliani said he hadn’t yet made up his mind about entering the race for 2008. But the alliance with Bracewell in early 2005 was a move made by a man who knew exactly what he needed to shore up his prospects: credibility in the Republican heartland. Also, the money was good. Oxford agreed to give Giuliani Partners $10 million, to be split among its three senior partners: Giuliani, Mike Hess, and Daniel Connolly, according to a story in The American Lawyer. In becoming Bracewell & Giuliani, the Texas firm would also commit $25 million to establish a New York office. As the head of that office, Giuliani would be guaranteed at least $1 million a year, plus 7.5 percent of all fees generated by the office. Yet his commitment to the law firm was less than half-time: Mondays and Fridays.

Politically so far, the move has paid off. By the middle of 2007, Giuliani had raised $4,788,168 in Texas, more than Hillary Clinton ($3,137,134), more even than the two closest Republican candidates combined (Mitt Romney’s $2,254,349 and John McCain’s $2,189,696). But in marrying into Bracewell, Giuliani has acquired a whole family of squirrelly relatives, from the firm’s own lobbyist-lawyers to the clients they represent.

Bracewell & Patterson has long been known for representing school districts. By the time Giuliani became part of it, in early 2005, it had also become the go-to law firm for major polluters: oil and gas as well as coal companies. Among its significant clients are Chevron/Texaco, Pacific Gas & Electric, Dynegy, Southern Company, Valero Energy, and Shell Oil.

Until recently, Citgo oil company was among those significant clients, but no longer. Last March, after a flurry of news stories, Giuliani was embarrassed: Citgo, since 1990, has been run by a state-owned Venezuelan petroleum company, and thus is currently controlled by the country’s president, Hugo Chávez. Giuliani had been knocking the virulently anti-American Chávez in speeches around the country. “We need a president who knows how to get things done, so we don’t have to be sending money to Chávez,” he declared in a speech in May. “Who would listen to Chávez if he didn’t have all this oil money?” In fact, Bracewell & Giuliani had been happy to take Chávez’s money: Bracewell had registered as a lobbyist for Citgo in April 2005, for $5,000 a month, right after Giuliani joined the firm. Bracewell finally ended its relationship with Citgo in June 2007.

Perhaps most unfortunately, Bracewell & Giuliani has supplied the legal and lobbying muscle to get new coal-fired power plants built all over the country. A dramatic example is the coal-fired plant called Desert Rock Energy Project, to be built by Sithe Global Power, a Bracewell client, on Navajo lands in Burnham, New Mexico. “To us, this is environmental injustice and economic exploitation,” declares Dailan Long, a Navajo activist. “We were never informed about this project thoroughly. The terms of the lease agreement have never been released to us.” Bracewell’s lobbyist Frank Maisano, the point man on Desert Rock, scoffs at that. “There have been more than 400 public meetings about the project over a four-year period,” he says. “They don’t have to disclose the terms of the lease. This is an agreement between Sithe Global and the Navajo Nation, and the lease is part of an ongoing process.” Maisano notes that the council of the Navajo Nation voted 66 to 7 for the plant. Long and other activists say the tribe’s elders have been misled about the environmental and financial impact on the community.

Howard Rubinstein, the well-known New York public-relations man who now represents Bracewell & Giuliani, has said that Giuliani “doesn’t lobby in any way” for the firm, and that lobbying makes up only about 2 percent of the firm’s earnings. So none of this really matters, nor do the contributions that the firm’s employees have made to Giuliani the candidate—at least $100,000 to date—or the contributions from the oil and gas companies: $545,058 as of mid-November 2007, way ahead of Mitt Romney ($309,933) and Hillary Clinton ($220,550). And, presumably, if Giuliani wins in November 2008, the firm would be known simply as Bracewell, not as Bracewell & President Giuliani.

The Road Through Texas Is Paved with Gold

Still, Giuliani’s presence at the firm may create some synergistic connections. Consider the Trans Texas Corridor debate.

For several years now, Texas governor Rick Perry has been pushing a plan that appalls many of his constituents—except, apparently, the most powerful ones—to outsource a spider’s web of new and improved state highways to Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. To ease Texans’ fears that the state is putting its future roads in the hands of a foreign-owned company, Cintra is now partnered with a San Antonio construction company called Zachry. The roads envisioned in this $184 billion, 4,000-mile project are no mere superhighways. They’re three football fields wide. They will include not only a rail line but also pipelines that can carry oil, gasoline, or liquefied natural gas. Alongside the roads will be distribution centers. Cintra-Zachry will lease the roads and levy whatever tolls it likes. And it will also control the distribution hubs, and charge what it likes there too. “I don’t want to see transportation become another battle between the haves and have-nots,” says former Texas Democratic congressman Chris Bell. “And it could quickly become that.”

The roads of the Trans Texas Corridor, as currently envisioned, would cut wide swaths through hundreds of farms and ranches. “Eminent domain is a huge issue here,” says Democratic Texas state representative Garnet Coleman. “The biggest opposition has come from farmers and ranchers who are along the proposed roads.” Eventually, the corridor might be extended to Canada. Coleman calls it “a super-nafta corridor.”

The connections may be coincidence, but they’re striking. Cintra is a client in Texas of Bracewell & Giuliani. The company it’s most likely to work with to extend the corridor north is Macquarie, which already operates its Indiana toll road in partnership with Cintra. In early 2007, Macquarie bought a chain of some 40 local Texas and Oklahoma newspapers. Might it have bought those papers to control public opinion in advance of plans to build more controversial toll roads? Might it potentially have in Giuliani not only a legal partner for future toll roads but a political ally?

Bracewell spokesperson Melanie Hillis says that Giuliani has not worked on behalf of Cintra or Macquarie. A Macquarie spokesperson adds that Cintra used Bracewell before it became Bracewell & Giuliani. He says that Macquarie is as likely to compete with Cintra as to cooperate on any future toll roads. He also declares that the purchase of those newspapers was made by the Macquarie Media Group, a separate division with no connection to Macquarie’s toll-road business. “To suggest that the acquisition was made to control public opinion in advance of building toll roads is absurd and incorrect. The business continues to be run by the same management team, with the same editorial staff. No editorial influence has been exercised by the Macquarie Media Group.” Anyway, the spokesperson adds, “I don’t think it is correct to say that the building of more toll roads in the United States is ‘a highly controversial plan.’ ”

That might come as a surprise to the farmers and ranchers who face the prospective loss of their land through eminent domain, and the Texans who feel their taxes entitle them to state-built freeways, not foreign-run toll roads. At the least, they seem less likely to get a sympathetic hearing from a president whose law firm represents Cintra and whose investment bank was sold to an Australian bank that often partners with Cintra and wants to build more U.S. toll roads.

Perhaps Giuliani does have little or nothing to do with his law firm’s principal clients. With at least one smaller client, however, he clearly played a role, and that role appears, to say the least, unpresidential.

In early 2006, Bracewell & Giuliani reviewed a proposed bank purchase. The Spanish bank Santander wanted to buy 20 percent of Sovereign Bancorp of Philadelphia. Bracewell’s review recommended the deal, the New York Stock Exchange and the S.E.C. eventually approved it, and so Santander bought in for $2.4 billion. The story, however, was a bit more complicated than that.

The review, according to one Sovereign insider, was paid for by the Spanish bank and dismissed the concerns of shareholders opposed to the acquisition. As a result, says this source, Bracewell ignored dubious dealings by Santander, such as its donations to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s political campaigns and its connections to Cuba and Iran (Santander was fined by the U.S. in 2004 for doing business with Cuba and has come under scrutiny for trading with an Iranian bank blacklisted by the U.S. for links to terrorism), not to mention the fact that its C.E.O. had been investigated for corruption. “I questioned why Rudy stuck his neck out like that,” the insider says. “Obviously it was for a fee, but with his long-term aspirations there didn’t seem like a lot of upside.” (Bracewell says that the firm was hired by Santander to assess the proposed investment and found that the bank “had fully and completely complied with all laws relevant to the transaction.”)

“Cheer and Loathing in New York,” by Gail Sheehy (June 2000), about the showdown between Rudy and Hillary in that year’s Senate race—before Rudy bowed out

“Giuliani’s Princess Bride,” by Judy Bachrach (September 2007)

“Crazy for Rudy,” by Michael Wolff (June 2007)

Illustration by Risko.

Almost immediately after the buy-in, Sovereign’s chairman, Jay Sidhu, resigned with a $44 million parachute. In November of that year, Giuliani gave a speech, for $100,000, at the Jay S. Sidhu School of Business & Leadership at Wilkes University, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

When the Chicago Tribune asked Bracewell managing partner Daniel Connolly about the timing of these events, Connolly said that Giuliani’s speech had no connection to the Bracewell review, which in any case was completed nine months before the speech. But a Wilkes University spokeswoman told the Tribune that, in fact, the university had identified Giuliani as a potential speaker in April 2006, formally asked him to speak in May, and signed a contract with him on June l3—two weeks after the Santander-Sovereign deal closed. (Giuliani’s speeches were arranged by the Washington Speakers Bureau.)

In the businesses that Giuliani built and bought these last six years, more deals have yet to be examined, more dots connected in the picture of his great financial success. But enough are there already, with lines between them, for a shape to have clearly emerged. It’s a picture of a politician leading a parade, as Mayor Giuliani so often did. Only the marchers behind him aren’t drum majorettes or wartime veterans or firefighters or police. They’re a ragtag band of Texas lawyers and energy lobbyists, penny-stock sharpies and security-industry entrepreneurs, agog with visions of the ultimate pay-to-play presidency.”

With additional reporting by Christopher Bateman.

Michael Shnayerson is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

Haven’t we seen that private equity deals, like the private equity toll road deals being perpetrated upon Texans (like the SH 130 toll road) are a bad deal all the way around for our Nation? Here’s another reason to oppose them and to be informed about the presidential candidates’ money trails…Giuliani has a few of his own.
________________________

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Congressman Duncan Hunter, R-California, who is running for President, called on Mitt Romney, another GOP candidate, to take a public stance on the proposed partnership between the private equity firm Romney founded and a Chinese-based company.

Before running for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney was the CEO and founder of Bain Capital Partners, a highly successful venture capital and investment firm based in Boston which currently manages more than $50 billion in assets, according to the company’s website.

Last month, Bain Capital and China’s Huawei Technology purchased 3Com in a deal valued at $2.2 billion. The deal gave the Chinese company a minority stake in 3Com, an internet security company.

Hunter says that 3Com has contracts with the U.S. Dept. of Defense. However, Bain Capital tells CNN 3Com does not contract with the U.S. government directly, and the Chinese company will not have access to sensitive U.S.-origin technology or U.S. government sales as a result of this transaction.
In a letter addressed to Romney, provided to CNN by Hunter’s campaign, Hunter claims the Chinese company has ties to Saddam Hussein and the Taliban and asks Romney to come forward with a “clear statement” in opposition to the deal sealed last October.

The Bain Capital deal in question “can only be characterized as irresponsible,” Hunter said in a written statement.
In September, other Republicans in the House called on the Bush administration to block the merger and proposed a resolution that says the deal “threatens the national security of the United States and should not be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.”

Romney’s campaign provided CNN the following statement in response to the request from Hunter, “Governor Romney is no longer involved in Bain Capital and their investment decisions.”

Link to article here. Read more about how Bracewell & Giuliani is the sole law firm for the Spanish company, Cintra who is building the Trans Texas Corridor. His conflicts of interest are astounding!

Giuliani Will Not Sever Ties to His Firm
By MARC SANTORA
New York Times
DECEMBER 9, 2007
Rudolph W. Giuliani, seeking to stem a spate of bad news in his bid for the Republican nomination, defended himself Sunday morning from a vast array of questions about his personal integrity, his judgment and possible conflicts of interest because of business ties, among other issues.

As the solo guest on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Giuliani was by turns defensive, apologetic and indignant under the questions of Tim Russert, but the interview never grew heated and at points Mr. Giuliani seemed amused.

He said he would not sever his financial ties with Giuliani Partners, the security consulting firm he founded. He also disassociated himself from the opinions of one of his more hawkish foreign policy advisers, tried to explain why he missed meetings of the Iraq Study Group to give lucrative speeches and once again tried to explain his recommendation of Bernard Kerik to head the office of Homeland Security.

His personal life was also touched upon, when Mr. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York who was twice divorced, was questioned about the decision to provide security to his then-girlfriend, now wife, Judith Nathan, at taxpayer expense.

Mr. Giuliani was dismissive when asked about the work his law firm, Bracewell/Giuliani, has done on behalf of Citgo Petroleum Corporation of Houston, the American subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA).

Hugo Chávez, the socialist leader of Venezuela who derides President Bush as a genocidal murderer, controls the state company.

Mr. Giuliani laughed loudly as Mr. Russert posed the question and then went on to claim that the law firm represented Citgo “just in Texas.”

He was also asked about some controversial clients of his security firm, Giuliani Partners, including the government of Qatar.

Members of the royal family in the Gulf Country are suspected of sheltering Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. “The reality is Qatar is an ally of the United States,” he said.

Mr. Russert pressed him on why he simply did not sever his financial ties with Giuliani Partners and make a full list of clients public.

Mr. Giuliani said certain confidentiality agreements made that impossible but he did not explain why he still takes money from the security firm, which he founded, while he runs for president.
He said he was “not going to do more than what is absolutely required.”

The explanation seemed to run counter to his defense of his decision to drop out of the Iraq Study Group.

Mr. Giuliani missed several early meetings, and on those days instead gave speeches for which he was paid millions of dollars.

Mr. Giuliani said that it was not personal gain that compelled him to quit the group, a bipartisan commission that was tasked with assessing the situation in Iraq. Rather, he said, he feared that as he considered running for president, his political ambition could taint the findings of the commission.

Mr. Russert pressed the point, saying that Mr. Giuliani had told no one at the time that he was quitting because of his presidential ambitions. Mr. Giuliani claimed he mentioned his rationale to James Baker, the Republican head of the study group.

Often there are one or two difficult issues a candidate will have to deal with when going on the Sunday morning talk shows. But the tough and serious questions for Mr. Giuliani, who was reluctant to appear on “Meet the Press,” according to people familiar with the booking process, did not seem to stop. Though the interview touched on foreign policy, fuel standards and even remarks by a rival, Mike Huckabee, most of the questions were about Mr. Giuliani’s personal record and decision making.

It was a reminder of just how much the campaign has been struggling of late to drive the news rather than simply respond.

For months, Mr. Giuliani was setting the agenda of the Republican race. Last spring, he focused on 9/11 and pushed the theme as far as he could. Throughout the summer, he used crime and New York as a foil to position himself as tough. And he started the fall talking almost solely about Hillary Clinton and his contention that he was the best candidate to beat her.

Even the question of abortion seemed to work for him, at once allowing him to say that he was going to not shift his pro-life stand despite the pressures of the primary while at the same time repeatedly invoke his desire to appoint “strict-constructionist” judges.

But in the last month, he has yet to find a successful narrative to move beyond the questions that are being raised about him.

On his decision to appoint Mr. Kerik — now under indictment on corruption charges — to lead the New York City Police Department and later to recommend him to for a critical job in keeping America safe from terrorism as head of the Homeland Security Department, Mr. Giuliani said, “The mistake was I should have checked it out much more carefully.”

But he also once again tried to point to successes Mr. Kerik had as his police commissioner.

On the question of police protection for Judith Nathan, Mr. Giuliani said it was a security matter and not his call and that no one really likes to have security anyway.

Mr. Russert focused on the timing of when the security was provided, citing reports that she was given security before December of 2000, suggesting that the security argument was hollow because Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with Ms. Nathan was secret.

Mr. Giuliani said he misunderstood the timing of his affair, noting that they went public in May of 2000.

But the details of discussion seemed of little importance. Words like affair, mistress, secret, and girlfriend are not what a candidate wants to be discussion one month before the first caucus and primary contests.

It is perhaps a bit surprising the Mr. Giuliani waited so long to go on the program, since the scrutiny will likely now be much greater.

However, Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is also seeking the Republican nomination, has also been reluctant to subject himself to tough questions. He is scheduled to appear on “Meet the Press” next Sunday.