{"id":4578,"date":"2009-05-17T23:05:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-18T05:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/2009\/05\/investment-council-takes-issue-with-ny-times-article\/"},"modified":"2009-05-17T23:05:00","modified_gmt":"2009-05-18T05:05:00","slug":"investment-council-takes-issue-with-ny-times-article","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2009\/05\/investment-council-takes-issue-with-ny-times-article\/","title":{"rendered":"Investment council takes issue with NY Times article"},"content":{"rendered":"

The spokesman for the State Investment Council<\/a> (SIC) is taking issue with a recent New York Times\u2019 article<\/a> related to the controversy surrounding third-party marketers in New York, New Mexico and elsewhere. <\/p>\n

The newspaper, citing minutes of a 2005 SIC meeting<\/a>, quoted David M. Leuschen, a go-between who helped The Carlyle Group<\/a> get big contracts, as saying this while helping the company win a $40 million investment in New Mexico:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe may be slow, we may be old, we may be plodders,\u201d Leuschen said, according to the SIC minutes, \u201cbut we think we know the right people, and this is very much a relationship business.\u201d<\/p>\n

In my own posting about the Times article, I called the newspaper\u2019s reporting \u201cstellar\u201d and \u201ccontextual.\u201d<\/a> Charles Wollmann, the SIC\u2019s public information officer, said it \u201cmay or may not be stellar,\u201d but it\u2019s definitely not contextual. He said the article implies that Carlyle and Riverstone, another company involved in that deal, won investment contracts \u201cbecause they knew people.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Wollmann pointed out, the Times left out the context of the quote from the 2005 meeting. Here\u2019s the full quote about the energy-related investment:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you take any large private equity firm or any hedge fund, they have somewhere between zero and one guy from the energy business. We have seventeen,\u201d Leuschen said, according to the minutes. \u201cAnd we may be slow, we may be old, we may be plodders, but we think we know the right people, and this is very much a relationship business that we can find deals that others won\u2019t see. Out of 16 deals we\u2019ve done so far, pushing $2 billion of equity committed, we had one deal that went to an auction. \u2026 The other 15 nobody else saw until we signed the paper.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Leuschen was saying, according to Wollmann, \u201cis that they know how to find deals in the energy industry due to the vast experience of their organization. They were referring to what\u2019s known in their industry as deal flow<\/a>. Identifying investment opportunities is at the core of private equity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMost disappointing, the NY Times reporter even cut the sentence down to make the quote appear to refer to something it did not,\u201d Wollmann said. \u201cIf that\u2019s not out of context, I don\u2019t know what is. It may be \u2018interesting\u2019 (he used quotes because I called the Times article interesting), but it\u2019s not very accurate, and it\u2019s not good journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wollmann also said his criticism \u201cshouldn\u2019t in any way minimize the concern we have regarding some of the placement fees paid to third party marketers. This is a big issue and in some instances — as evidenced in New York certainly — a big problem. But it is one that\u2019s nationwide, with dozens of states now looking at this practice and what needs to be done going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI just have problems when someone — especially someone as respected as the NYT — goes out of their way to make it look like there was an obvious red flag at the time that was simply ignored,\u201d Wollmann said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The spokesman for the State Investment Council (SIC) is taking issue with a recent New York Times\u2019 article related to the controversy surrounding third-party marketers in New York, New Mexico and elsewhere. The newspaper, citing minutes of a 2005 SIC meeting, quoted David M. Leuschen, a go-between who helped The Carlyle Group get big contracts, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4578"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4578\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}