On 8/1/2015 4:40 AM, Roy wrote:
None of George Bush's offspring is more his father's son than George W.
Bush. George Jr., or "Shrub" as Molly Ivins refers to him, began his own
Texas oil career in the mid-1970s when he formed Bush Exploration. Like
the business dealings of his brothers, George's company was not a
success, and it was rescued in 1983 by another oil company, Spectrum 7,
run by several staunch and well-heeled Reagan-Bush supporters. But by
mid-1986, a soft oil market found Spectrum also near bankruptcy.

Many oil companies went belly-up during that time. But Spectrum had one
asset the others lacked -- the son of the vice-president. Rescue came in
1986 in the form of Harken Energy, just in the nick of time. Harken
absorbed Spectrum, and, in the process, Junior got $600,000 worth of
Harken stock in return for his Spectrum shares. He also won a lucrative
consulting contract and stock options. In all, the deal would put well
over $1 million in his pocket over the next few years -- even though
Harken itself lost millions.

Harken Energy was formed in 1973 by two oilmen who would benefit from a
successful covert effort to destabilize Australia's Labor Party
government (which had attempted to shut out foreign oil exploration). A
decade later, Harken was sold to a new investment group headed by New
York attorney Alan G. Quasha, a partner in the firm of Quasha, Wessely &
Schneider. Quasha's father, a powerful attorney in the Philippines, had
been a staunch supporter of then-president Ferdinand Marcos. William
Quasha had also given legal advice to two top officials of the notorious
Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, a CIA operation.

After the sale of Harken Energy in 1983, Alan Quasha became a director
and chairman of the board. Under Quasha, Harken suddenly absorbed
Junior's struggling Spectrum 7 in 1986. The merger immediately opened a
financial horn of plenty and reversed Junior's fortunes. But like his
brother Jeb, Junior seemed unconcerned about the characters who were
becoming his benefactors. Harken's $25 million stock offering in 1987,
for example, was underwritten by a Little Rock, Arkansas, brokerage
house, Stephens, Inc., which placed the Harken stock offering with the
London subsidiary of Union Bank -- a bank that had surfaced in the
scandal that resulted in the downfall of the Australian Labor government
in 1976 and, later, in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal. (It was also Union
Bank, according to congressional hearings on international money
laundering, that helped the now-notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce
International skirt Panamanian money-laundering laws by flying cash out
of the country in private jets, and that was used by Ferdinand Marcos to
stash 325 tons of Philippine gold around the world.)