RSS
Home
Dianne Feinstein in hot water again
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Dianne Feinstein certainly knows how to work the system. Feinstein served as San Francisco’s first (and so far only) female mayor, and is now our State’s Senior Senator. She has come under scrutiny in the past due to the fact that her husband is quite a heavyweight in winning government contracts. She's been in trouble for this kind of thing before. Today however, according to the Washington Times:
Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced legislation to route $25 billion in taxpayer money to a government agency that had just awarded her husband's real estate firm a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms.
How much higher? If we read on we find that:
Under the FDIC contract, CBRE charges a $5,000 sales commission for each property and can collect an additional $2,500 incentive fee if they sell it in under six months. In other words, they can collect as much as $7,500 on the sale of a property worth $25,000 or less - which works out to a sales commission of 30 percent or more.
The entire article is well worth a read, and not just because there are legitimate questions about who knew what, and when they knew it. My personal favorite line in the entire article comes from Milt Shaw, who (according to the article) is senior vice president of LPS Asset Management Solutions, managing nearly 20,000 foreclosed properties for banks and other clients. Shaw said the compensation package was “a little egregious.” A little egregious? What does that mean? This situation is a just a smidgen unbelievably terrible?
I think that Milt Shaw is quite brave for making the accusation at all, even with the neutering qualifier he manages to slip in. In a market that is increasingly under the thumb of federal bureaucrats, you might think it makes more sense to initiate the kind of ring-kissing that Allstate’s CEO recently undertook in his NYT opinion piece “Regulate Me, Please.” Or maybe Milt Shaw knows that since he isn’t the third husband of a career bureaucrat, he probably won’t be getting much of that sweetheart business anyway.
Related Articles:
Comments
