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.
The New Mexico Finance Authority has asked the office of Attorney General Gary King to look into trying to recover millions of dollars lost in a deal at the center of a federal pay-to-play investigation.
The authority’s chairman, Stephen Flance, said Wednesday that he hoped to recover money from a series of companies that recommended that the agency use complicated financial vehicles called interest-rate swaps.
Ultimately the market for the swaps collapsed, causing the agency to refinance roughly $450 million of $1.7 billion in bonds used to the state’s high-profile transportation program — GRIP, short for Governor Richardson’s Investment Partnership.
That refinancing cost $6 million to $10 million, NMFA officials said Wednesday.
It is that money that Flance hopes the agency can recover, he said.
“We thought we were getting independent advice, and I think that it was not as independent as we were led to believe,” Flance said of the team of advisers. “I think that they had a product to sell.”
The companies that might find themselves on the business end of the Attorney General’s legal complaint, if it comes to that, are JP Morgan Chase Co. and UBS, among others. The two firms were among those on a team of advisers that recommended the swaps, Flance said.
Both JP Morgan and UBS sold a portion of $1.1 billion in bonds for the New Mexico Finance Authority in April 2004, which helped finance the GRIP program. A California company at the center of a federal investigation involving the financial authority, meanwhile, got a state contract to advise the authority on the swaps.
The company, CDR Financial Products, earned close to $1 million in fees for that service.
Federal prosecutors have been looking into a lucrative contract that the finance authority awarded to CDR Financial Inc., which also made big contributions to political action committees formed by Gov. Bill Richardson.
CDR is also being investigated elsewhere because of deals that have gone sour. It is being sued by several municipalities, according to published reports.
One of those places was Jefferson County, Ala., where JP Morgan and CDR worked together to advise the county on municipal bond debts.
The series of bond and interest-rate swap sales in 2002 and 2003 were for sewers in Jefferson County, which covers about 1,125 square miles including Birmingham, the state’s largest city with more than 240,000 residents.
Since credit markets seized up in 2007, Jefferson County’s annual sewer debt payment more than doubled.
Now Jefferson County is close to bankruptcy and it is negotiating with JP Morgan Chase to in an effort to solve its financial crisis. JPMorgan is one of several parties that have offered $1.3 billion in concessions to help solve Jefferson County’s sewer crisis, according to the Birmingham News.
