I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Gov. Bill Richardson on Thursday banned controversial finders’ fees through executive order.
On Friday, he said he’d consider legislation to immortalize the ban in state statute. “I’ll consider that,” Richardson said Friday at the College of Santa Fe.
An executive order can be changed by a future chief executive, a fact that Richardson acknowledged Friday.
Richardson took the extraordinary step of banning the controversial fees as names involved in a New York investment scandal have popped up here.
A State Investment Council document released earlier this month also shows that those close to Richardson, or those are related to people close to Richardson received hefty finders fees over the past several years.
In particular, the document shows that Marc Correra, the son of a close confidant of Richardson, or his company made more than $10 million as a third-party agent over several years. One of the deals that Correra made money on involved Vanderbilt Financial Trust and $50 million the state invested in securities the Chicago-based firm was marketing. That transaction is at the heart of a separate whistleblower lawsuit brought against the state by the former investment officer of the state’s Education Retirement Board.
Correra’s work on the Vanderbilt deal was first reported by the Associated Press last week. It is unclear from the state document how much Correra made on the deal.
Guy Riordan, once a confidant of Richardson before he was tangled up in the recent state treasurer scandal, also made money acting as a third-party agent, also called a third-party marketer. According to the document, Riordan split a $1.235 million fee in one deal and then made more than $300,000 on another, the documents show.
Third-party agents are paid not by the state but by managers who are trying to interest the state — or any one of several agencies that make certain investments — to put money into their funds. In theory, those funds would manage the state’s investment and earn it a return.
A spokesman for Richardson, Gilbert Gallegos, said Thursday hours after Richardson banned the fees that the state did not pay the third-party agents and that the governor did not know the amount of money some of these third-party agents were pulling down.
Also on Thursday Gallegos told KUNM that until recent weeks the governor’s office did not know about the amounts of money paid to third-party agents.
“The amounts of money (paid to third-party agents) were not disclosed,” he told KUNM. “They haven’t been traditionally been disclosed anywhere, not in any state, or in any other government because they are not deals that involve the state of New Mexico.”
Gallegos went on to say that the state focused not on what agents were paid but on making sure New Mexico was seeing a good return on its investments.
