If you don't like Paul Pelosi's investments now, wait until Nancy makes him a UC regent

11-12-11
CBS 60 Minutes
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57324034/pelosi-defends-record-after...
 
11-12-11
San Francisco Chronicle
Pelosi's investments questioned in CBS report…Carolyn Lochhead, Chronicle Washington Bureau
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/12/MNPA1LTOJK.D...
 
Washington -- House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is the subject of a report on the stock investments of members of Congress that is to air Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes."
 
The San Francisco Democrat and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, were questioned separately at their weekly news conferences Nov. 3 by reporter Steve Kroft. Neither had granted Kroft's previous requests for interviews.
 
Kroft asked both leaders about stock transactions they made while Congress was considering legislation that could affect the financial and insurance industries. Pelosi and Boehner vigorously denied any connection.
 
Laws against insider trading - making stock bets based on information the public doesn't have - do not apply to Congress. Studies have shown that stock portfolios on Capitol Hill outperform the market. Legislation that would ban insider trading by members and staffers has languished.
 
Kroft asked Pelosi why she and her investor husband, Paul Pelosi, bought an initial public offering of stock in Visa, the San Francisco-based credit card company, in March of 2008.
 
The same month, former House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced the Credit Card Fair Fee Act, which would have given merchants the power to negotiate lower fees with credit card companies. The bill, hostile to the credit card industry, was passed by the committee but never brought to the floor. Pelosi was speaker at the time, and controlled which legislation came to a vote.
 
The Pelosis bought the Visa stock in three transactions totaling $1 million to $5 million, according to financial disclosure reports. The first was the IPO, followed by two other purchases of the stock at higher prices, Pelosi said.
 
Pelosi said the Conyers bill had no chance of being signed by then-President George W. Bush. She said she brought even tougher legislation, the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights by Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., to passage after President Obama took office.
 
Pelosi said the credit card industry spent $3 million in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat Maloney in 2010.
 
"First of all, what you are contending is not true," Pelosi said at her news briefing last week. "But second of all, we are very proud of our record of what happened."
 
Kroft asked what was untrue given that the Pelosis had bought the Visa stock two years earlier.
 
"Well, I have many investments ... I will hold my record in fighting the credit card companies, as a speaker of the House or as a member of Congress, up against anyone." Pelosi said. " We had passed the Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights. I don't know what your point is."
 
Kroft then asked whether there was an appearance of a conflict of interest. "No, it only has the appearance if you decide that you are going to elaborate on a false premise," Pelosi said. "But it is not true, and that is that."
 
When Kroft said, "I don't understand what part is not true," Pelosi replied, "That I would act upon an investment."
 
Boehner has adviser
 
Boehner was asked at his news conference why he traded in insurance industry stock shortly before announcing that a plan for national health insurance was dead. Boehner said a financial adviser makes decisions on day-to-day trading in his investments.
 
The "60 Minutes" segment follows a flurry of stories about wrongdoing in Washington, including a segment on the program last week by disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who served 3 1/2 years in prison for his 2006 conviction in a lobbying corruption scandal that helped bring down former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas.
 
Abramoff said he lavished gifts on members of Congress, offered lucrative jobs to their staff and got them to insert opaque legislative language into bills that benefited specific clients. Pelosi promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington when she took control. Abramoff asserted that reforms have been ineffective.
 
Pelosi's office said "60 Minutes" told her staff that the report was based on a book by conservative writer Peter Schweizer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who earlier had accused the Pelosis of hypocrisy for hiring non-union labor at their Napa vineyard.
 
Labor at the vineyard
 
A report at the time by ABC's San Francisco affiliate, KGO-TV, found that the Pelosis paid their workers more than union wages and that it would have been illegal for them to encourage unionization.
 
Several studies have shown that members of Congress and their staffs do better in the stock market than the public. A 2011 study by four university researchers found that a portfolio that mirrored stock purchases by House members from 1985 to 2001 beat the market by 6 percent a year. The same authors found that senators beat the market by 12.3 percent from 1993 to 1998.
 
The Wall Street Journal reported a year ago that in 2008 and 2009 at least 72 congressional aides traded shares of companies that their bosses helped oversee. The staff interviewed included a Pelosi aide who said her husband made the trades based on newspaper reports and that she knew nothing about them.
 
A bill by Reps. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., and Tim Walz, D-Minn. called the STOCK Act, or Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, would ban members of Congress and staff from insider trading. The legislation, which Pelosi supports, was first introduced in 2006 and has gone nowhere.
 
 
 
1-1-07
San Francisco Chronicle 
 
Pelosi's husband prefers a low profile
Successful investor has taken care to avoid causing controversy
John Wildermuth, Chronicle Political Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/01/MNG83NB37E1.DTL

 
For more than 20 years, Paul Pelosi has been able to stay in the shadows, even as the millions he has made as a successful San Francisco financier and businessman have helped fuel the political career of his wife, Nancy.
 
"I've made a conscious effort to not be involved or give the appearance of being involved in her political career," he told The Chronicle in 2004. "People should realize that she's the one."
 
That could change now that Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi is slated Thursday to become the first female elected speaker of the House of Representatives. Many of the same conservative Republican commentators and bloggers who used this past campaign to raise the threat of her "San Francisco values" steering Congress hard to the left are turning their sights on 66-year-old Paul Pelosi and his investments as a way of attacking the new Democratic speaker.
 
Nancy Pelosi's Washington staff already has hunkered down. Paul Pelosi won't be giving interviews because "he's a private person, not involved in political life," said Jennifer Crider, a spokeswoman for the speaker-to-be. "Mr. Pelosi's investments are separate from hers, and they have separate careers."
 
But the couple's net worth, most of it linked to Paul Pelosi's investments, has made the legislator the ninth-richest person in the 435-member House.
 
The family money, along with the many business and social connections Paul Pelosi has brought to their 43-year marriage, gave Nancy Pelosi the financial independence she needed to spend long hours doing unpaid Democratic Party business in the 1970s and 1980s. Since she was elected to Congress in 1987, it has also added a degree of comfort to her life in Washington, where she has a $1 million-plus residence and a lifestyle that doesn't depend on the $212,100 annual salary she will receive as speaker.
 
"Having a Town Car pick you up is way better than Yellow Cab," said Joe Cotchett, a Burlingame attorney and Democratic fundraiser who is a longtime friend of the Pelosis.
 
"Frankly, it's a copout to say, 'My husband makes the money,' " said Peter Schweizer, a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution whose recent book "Do as I Say (Not as I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy" contains a chapter on the Pelosis.
 
"It's not a viable defense. Nancy Pelosi is fully aware of what the issues are (for elected officials) and is not naive about financial matters."
 
Paul Pelosi isn't naive about political matters, either. Described by his wife as a "real progressive Democrat," he was willing to uproot their five children from their home in Presidio Terrace in 1987 and move into a rented place in Pacific Heights, firmly inside the congressional district Nancy Pelosi was set to run for.
 
Nancy Pelosi said in 1985 that "I won't be running for office." But she changed her mind when Rep. Sala Burton died. Burton had been elected in 1983 to the San Francisco congressional seat after the death of her husband, Phil. The Burtons had been political mentors for Nancy Pelosi, and Sala Burton, on her deathbed, urged Pelosi to run for the seat.
 
Paul Pelosi was intimately involved in his wife's first election, joining two veteran San Francisco politicians, Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy and former Rep. John Burton -- Phil Burton's brother -- as the triumvirate behind the successful campaign, said Clint Reilly, who was Nancy Pelosi's campaign consultant.
 
"He was very helpful in the campaign and helped raise the money," Reilly said. "He took an interest in how the campaign was being run ... and attended meetings with me to make sure the campaign was on the right track."
 
That political connection has continued. From the beginning, the Pelosis have had a bicoastal relationship, with Paul Pelosi living and working in San Francisco and spending about a week or so each month with his wife in Washington.
 
"I think one of the reasons why we have a good working relationship is that I try not to make too many demands on Paul's time as far as the political stuff is concerned," Nancy Pelosi told The Chronicle in 1987.
 
But with Paul Pelosi spending so much time in San Francisco, it was probably inevitable that he'd do some of the work back in the district. He's a regular at fundraising dinners and political events, often standing in for his wife.
 
"In terms of San Francisco, he and Nancy are interchangeable. He's there at so many events," Reilly said. "If he's in the room, it's about like Nancy is in the room. He's a very effective surrogate."
 
That first campaign in 1987 also gave Paul Pelosi a taste of what the future would bring as the spouse of a very visible politician. Nancy Pelosi's leading opponent, San Francisco Supervisor Harry Britt, hired a private detective to look into the Pelosi family and its business dealings.
 
Although Britt admitted the investigation failed to turn up "any heavy scandals," he did publicize a rent dispute Paul Pelosi had with residents of a Lake Street apartment he owned. Reporters also received anonymous news clippings, some dating back 50 years, about political controversies involving the San Francisco insurance business of Paul Pelosi's father and his brothers' various dealings in the city.
 
"They've been trying to get me," Paul Pelosi said at the time.
 
But the dustup showed that the businessman already had learned some political lessons. Even before Nancy Pelosi filed to run for office, her husband had sold the troublesome San Francisco apartment building and limited his investments to more congenial commercial property.
 
In fact, Nancy Pelosi's most recent financial disclosure statement shows just how careful Paul Pelosi has been in his investment decisions. Because the federal statements require a politician to give only a range of value for investments, they show the Pelosis' net worth was $14.7 million to $55 million in 2005, ranking them ninth in the House and 17th in the entire Congress.
 
The bulk of the Pelosis' money comes from investments in stocks and real estate. Operating through Financial Leasing Services, his San Francisco investment firm, Paul Pelosi owns stock in companies including Microsoft, AT&T, Cisco Systems, Disney, Johnson & Johnson and a variety of tech stocks.
 
Real estate investments include a four-story office building at 45 Belden St. in the Financial District, office buildings on Battery and Sansome streets near the Embarcadero, a building housing a Walgreens drugstore near Ocean Beach and other commercial property in San Anselmo.
 
Other investments include a St. Helena vineyard worth between $5 million and $25 million, a $1 million-plus townhome in Norden (Nevada County), and minority interests in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel in Rutherford, the CordeValle Golf Club in San Martin, and the Piatti Italian restaurant chain.
 
Friends say Paul Pelosi must consider more than profits when he views business opportunities. With a wife who's a leader in Congress, every investment is a potential minefield.
 
"Paul Pelosi is subject to a much higher level of scrutiny than the normal businessperson," said Reilly, who's moved out of political consulting and into the business world. "You need peripheral vision to look at the potential conflicts."
 
"He's passed up a lot of big opportunities because he knew it might not look good for Nancy," Cotchett added.
 
The investing strategy seems to have paid off. Besides being successful financially, Paul Pelosi has avoided almost any suggestion of hooking his investment portfolio to Nancy Pelosi's growing political power.
 
Ken Boehm, head of the conservative National Legal and Policy Center in Virginia, spent months last year looking into Nancy Pelosi's financial records, campaign contributions and legislative records, looking for any hint of impropriety.
 
"There was no sign that she enriched herself personally by her official actions," he told The Chronicle last year. "She didn't cross the line as far as I could tell."
 
But the Pelosis are prepared for criticism, especially from those who have their political differences with Nancy Pelosi.
 
In his book, for example, Schweizer charges that Nancy Pelosi doesn't practice the liberal code she preaches.
 
 
While Nancy Pelosi has been a longtime supporter of the United Farm Workers, the small vineyard she and her husband own in St. Helena doesn't hire union labor to pick the grapes there. Likewise, the couple have investments in the boutique hotel in Rutherford and the upscale Italian restaurant chain, which aren't union shops.
 
 
"If your view is that labor unions are essential to protecting workers' rights, you ought to have the attitude that we really need a union" in your own investments, Schweizer said.
 
The charges Schweizer aimed at the Pelosis in his book were quickly picked up by conservative commentators such as KSFO's Melanie Morgan, Matt Drudge and Fox News' Sean Hannity and echoed by dozens of right-of-center blogs as examples of Democratic hypocrisy and a sign of the left-wing disaster they were predicting for a Pelosi-led Congress.
 
But there were few complaints from the union leaders and workers linked to the Pelosis' investments.
 
Nancy Pelosi "has really gotten a bad rap," said Marc Grossman, spokesman for the farmworkers union. "Under California labor law, it would be illegal for her or her family to talk with the union about a contract until the workers had voted to organize."
 
The UFW has only a handful of contracts in the Napa Valley, and the crews that harvest the Pelosis' 7-acre vineyard haven't made any move to seek union representation, Grossman said.
 
"I don't know how many workers it would take to harvest the property, but it wouldn't be very many and wouldn't take a long time," he added.
 
Paul Pelosi's liability -- and political exposure -- also is limited by his minority interest in several of his investments. He owns less than a 10 percent stake in the Rutherford hotel and the restaurant chain and isn't directly involved in their management, said Crider, spokeswoman for the congresswoman.
 
The growing attacks in the blogosphere are just a sample of what the Pelosis are going to face after Nancy Pelosi becomes speaker this week.
 
Already, Paul Pelosi has indicated that rather than respond publicly, he's just going to ignore the charges and the finger-pointing.
 
"That's exactly the tack to take right now," said Dan Schnur, a veteran GOP consultant. "In a blog-filled world, it's impossible to stay invisible, but there's a difference between being on the Internet and being on '60 Minutes.' "
 
This political free-for-all probably wasn't what Paul Pelosi signed up for when he graduated from Georgetown University in 1962 and a year later married Baltimore's Nancy D'Alesandro, but he's shown he's willing to accept it on his own terms.
 
Paul Pelosi "is no Nancy Reagan, always looking adoringly at his spouse," Reilly said. "There's nothing off-limits in politics, where you can be attacked for whatever you do. But he's kept his business interests far away from public offices and provided Nancy with strong emotional support. He's probably the perfect husband for a high-profile woman."
 
 
 
September 2010
Spot.us - Community Powered Reporting
 Investor’s Club: How the UC Regents Spin Public Funds into Private Profit
By Peter Byrne Peer review by Bernice Yeung
http://spot.us/pitches/337-investors-club-how-the-uc-regents-spin-public-funds-into-private-profit/story
 
The Investors’ Club: How the University of California Regents Spin Public Money into Private Profit “
 
As universities become glorified vocational schools for corporations they adopt values and operating techniques of the corporations they serve.” – Chris Hedges (Empire of Illusion, 2009)
 
This piece has been republished by The Berkeley Daily Planet. A version of it also ran in the Sacramento News & Review, Santa Cruz Weekly, North Bay Bohemian, and the SF Public Press. Analysis from California Watch, The Aggie, Huffington Post, KCSB Radio, SFBG, The Daily Nexus and more. The story has been nominated for a Project Censored Award and has won the SPJ Northern California Chapter's James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Journalism. It was also a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors award.
 
•Part One: The Investor's Club - Published below.
Introduction and overview of the 8-part investigation. The eight parts of this investigation and two appendixes are linked within the introduction. They may be read sequentially or as stand alone stories.
•See Part Two: The Smell Test
 
How to tell the difference between a conflict of interest and a coincidence.
•See Part Three: The Regents' Club
Conflicts of interest are nothing new at UC, but they are getting worse.
•See Part Four: Seven Private Equity Deals
How Regent Richard C. Blum benefited from $748 million worth of private equity and bond investments by UC.
•See Part Five: Four Case Studies in Conflicts of Interest by UC Regents
The nitty gritty of how these deals went down.
•See Part Six: Billion Dollar Babies & The Senator's Educational Conflict
The University of California invests $53 million in two diploma mills owned by a regent married to a U.S. Senator.
•See Part Seven: Tapping the State Pension Fund
Against all odds, literally, a regent secures billions of dollars in CalPERS investments.
•See Part Eight: Blum Capital Partners Gets Lucky
UC owns stocks in all of the public companies in Regent Richard C. Blum's portfolio.
•See Appendix One: Research Methodology
•See Appendix Two: Financial Dossiers of Regents to Watch
 
Part One: The Investors’ Club: How the University of California Regents Spin Public Money into Private Profit:
 
Experts identify multiple conflicts of interest among an elite group that oversees investments for the University of California.
 
Last fall, amid an unprecedented state budget crisis, the University of California Board of Regents took extraordinary measures to cut costs and generate revenue. Lecturers were laid off, classes eliminated. The board reduced admissions for in-state students, while increasing the admission of out-of-state students, who pay higher fees than state residents. And to the consternation of tens of thousands of students, undergraduate tuition was raised by 32 percent, with more hikes to come.
         
It now costs about $30,000 per year to attend the University of California (UC) as an undergraduate, including tuition and expenses. Even with student aid, it’s a sum beyond the means of many students and their families.
 
While education took a beating, the regents authorized $3 million in bonuses to a handful of top administrators, and reduced the salaries of janitorial staff. The regents approved new construction projects, including a sports stadium. They assured Wall Street bond underwriters that periodic tuition increases would help pay off hundreds of millions of dollars in new construction loans.
 
Objecting to the tuition increases, UC students, employees, and professors staged demonstrations at regents’ meetings and on campuses across the state. Some protestors accused the regents of “privatizing” the university to benefit industrial corporations and Wall Street investors. While it is true that the university’s ties to corporate and banking interests are many and legion, there is a special kind of privatization taking place behind closed doors.
 
Our eight-month investigation reveals that some members of the regents’ investment committee, who are also Wall Street heavy-hitters, have modified long-standing investment policies in a way that benefited their own financial holdings. The fallout: multiple conflicts of interest.
See Part Two: The Smell Test
The changes can be traced to post-2003, when regents Gerald Parsky, Richard C. Blum, and Paul Wachter—all financiers by trade—took control of UC’s investment strategy. Sitting on the board’s investment committee, the three men steered away from investing in more traditional instruments, such as blue-chip stocks and bonds, toward largely unregulated “alternative” investments, such as private equity and private real estate deals. According to UC internal reports, the dramatic investment change has led to an “overweighting” of investments in private equity. One concerned regent has likened the change to “gambling in Las Vegas.”
 
The changes did not stop there.
By-passing the university treasurer’s in-house investment specialists, the regents investment committee hired private managers to handle many of these new kinds of less-regulated transactions. This action theoretically placed some distance between the personal financial holdings of regent's and the investments made on behalf of the UC endowment and retirement funds. But it also served to increase management costs, and to limit the transparency around UC's investments, since these “external” managers are not subject to the same public disclosure laws that apply to university operations.
Unfortunately, many of these deals, while potentially lucrative, have lost significant amounts of money for UC’s retirement and endowment funds, which were worth $63 billion at the end of 2009. (These losses ultimately reduce the amount spent on education, since the endowment supports teaching activities.) And the non-transparency of these private deals enabled multiple conflicts of interest to arise without challenge.
 
Specifically, our investigation shows that, under the new regime on the investment committee, UC placed $2 billion into a series of private deals and publicly held enterprises with significant ties to the business activities of four regents: Wachter, Blum, Sherry Lansing, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
         
State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) was asked to review the findings of this investigation prior to publication. “These are amazing conflicts of interest,” he concluded. “They happened after the UC Regents’ investment committee drastically changed policy away from investing in fixed income securities and into risky private equity buyout funds—thus enriching several regents with ties to those funds.”
 
Yee added, “And contracting out the management of corporate investments to firms who make their money by generating management fees was just a terrible idea.”
See Part Three: The Regents' Club
Summary of findings on Mr. Blum
After Mr. Blum was appointed to the Board of UC Regents in 2002, UC invested $748 million in seven private equity deals in which he or his firm, Blum Capital Partners, was a major investor. (Mr. Wachter was involved in one of these deals as an investor). Many of these deals were operated in partnership with TPG Capital, where Mr. Blum is an investor and an executive, according to the economic disclosure statements of his spouse, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), and other public records.
 
The Blum-related private equity deals in which UC has invested are: Washington Mutual and First American Corporation (2008); Harrah’s Entertainment (2008); Univision (2007); Freescale Semiconductor (2007); Sungard Data Systems (2005); Kinetic Concepts (2003); Commonfund (2002).
See Part Four: Seven Private Equity Deals
UC has also invested $84 million in real estate and private equity deals, as well as the stock of a public corporation, in which Mr. Blum held significant interests:
 
• A UC investment of $42 million, beginning in 2006, enabled the buyout of a real estate company, Glenborough Realty Trust, in which Mr. Blum was a member of the board of directors and a stockholder. UC’s investment in the fund that purchased Glenbourough has declined in value by $38.5 million.
• In 2007, UC invested $16.6 million in Colony Capital, a private equity firm to which Mr. Blum has numerous business ties.
• As of late 2007, Mr. Blum’s San Francisco-based firm, Blum Capital Partners, had benefited from a $26 million investment in Janus Capital Group made by UC, as well as from related investments in Janus made by UC’s external managers. 
See Part Five: Four Case Studies in Conflicts of Interest by UC Regents
• Starting in 2004, Blum Capital Partners bought substantial ownership stakes in two for-profit vocational schools in which UC concurrently invested $53 million. These same educational corporations are seeing increases to their enrollment and profit due to class cut-backs at state-funded universities and colleges such as UC. And in 2007, Sen. Feinstein initiated federal legislation that benefited these two companies and other for-profit educational corporations.
See Part Six: Billion Dollar Babies & The Senator's Educational Conflict
•  Since 2004 the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) has invested billions of dollars in deals that served the financial interests of Mr. Blum, Mr. Wachter, and Gov. Schwarzenegger, often in tandem with UC’s investments in the same deals. During this period, Blum Capital Partners, was an investment advisor to CalPERS.
See Part Seven: Tapping the State Pension Fund
• At the end of 2009, UC held investments totaling $304 million in all 18 of the public companies in which Blum Capital Partners held a substantial or controlling stake.
See Part Eight: Blum Capital Partners Gets Lucky
Summary of other findings
• Since 2003, the regents have invested $411 million in Dimensional Fund Advisors, a company partly owned by Gov. Schwarzenegger and Mr. Wachter. UC also put $75 million into Apollo Management private equity funds in which Mr. Wachter and Gov. Schwarzenegger are invested. (See Part 4 & Part 7)
 •  Since September 2006, Regent Lansing (who is not on the investment committee) has been a member of the board of directors of Qualcomm Inc., for which she receives an annual director’s fee of $135,000, plus stock options. According to her economic disclosure statement, Ms. Lansing owns “more than $1 million” in Qualcomm stock options (no upper limit is specified). In 2009, Qualcomm paid her $485,252. Documents released by the UC Treasurer show that, after Ms. Lansing joined the Qualcomm board, UC quadrupled its investment in Qualcomm to $397 million. Ms. Lansing told us that she did not instruct the treasurer or members of the investment committee to buy Qualcomm stock.
Ken Boehm, the chairman of the conservative watchdog group National Legal and Policy Center in Fairfax, Virginia, reviewed the findings of this investigation. “It is hard to imagine more clear-cut examples of conflicts of interest than UC investing in companies and private equity funds in which regents have financial stakes,” Boehm said. “Plus, many of these investments are risky, and the regents have a fiduciary duty to invest more safely. This flat-out looks like wholesale conflicts of interest, of people taking care of their buddies.”
Ethics experts on the other side of the political spectrum agreed. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, the liberal good-government advocacy group based in Washington D.C., was also appraised of the findings of this investigation prior to publication. “A third grader can see that what the regents on the investment committee are doing is unethical,” he said. “It goes far beyond the ‘appearance’ of a conflict of interest. These are core conflicts of interest.”
Neither Mr. Blum nor Gov. Schwarzenegger responded to repeated written requests for comment. UC Treasurer Marie Berggren and UC President Yudof also declined to comment. In an emailed statement, Berggren’s spokesperson, Lynn Tierney, said, “It’s misguided to assume that there’s a conflict of interest simply because there’s an overlap between personal investments by University of California Regents and investments made by the UC Treasurer’s Office. The real issue is whether Regents communicate with the Treasurer’s Office about specific investments.”
 
Tierney added that the treasurer does not track the regent’s personal investments.