"Portland State protest ‘delusional,’ Wheeler says, as local leaders advise public caution"
_____
"for the life of me, I do not understand how terrorizing local business operators can possibly impact events in the Middle East,” Wheeler said
at a Thursday press conference held at the Portland Police Bureau’s Central Precinct.
“If you believe
that damaging those businesses or trashing a library on a university campus will impact events in the Middle East,
then you are delusional.”
_____
Oregon public pension fund gave blessing to NSO Group deal, sources suggest
How about teachers, professors, and other Oregon PERs beneficiaries that invest blindly in Israel's NSO and spyware Pegasus.
Since beliefs make one culpable, not actions according to former State Treasurer Wheeler.
" In his comments, Wheeler seemed
to commingle other recent demonstrations
with the PSU protest;
a May Day march in downtown Portland Wednesday night left some business windows smashed."
_____
The Guardian:
"Oregon’s public pension fund, which manages tens of billions of dollars in retirement savings,
appears to have privately given its blessing to a 2019 deal by an investment fund to acquire
NSO Group, the controversial spyware company.
A source with close knowledge of the matter and emails seen by the Guardian suggest that
a senior official at the pension fund signalled his strong support for the takeover of NSO
as early as 2018,
months before the deal was announced.
(Hold on, Ambassador Sondland's wife was in charge or PERs or was it Wheeler.....)
Last month, Oregon officials said they were “deeply disturbed” by reports that NSO Group “enabled widespread human rights violations”.
However, it now appears that the Oregon pension fund,
one of the most prominent in the US, gave its tacit approval over an investment in NSO several years ago –
at a time when security researchers were already publicly raising alarms about the company.
NSO, which is based in Israel, was recently blacklisted by the Biden administration
and accused of acting against the national security interests of the US.
The US commerce department said in November 2021 it was adding NSO to the so-called Entity List
based on evidence that the company had developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments
that used the tools to “maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics and embassy workers”.
A spokesperson for Tobias Read, the Democratic Oregon state treasurer who has oversight of the pension fund,
issued a statement in December supporting the administration’s decision.
The statement was significant because Oregon invested $233m in a private equity firm, Novalpina Capital, in 2017
. Novalpina’s fund then acquired a controlling stake in NSO in 2019,
making the Oregon fund the largest indirect investor in the spyware company.
(Katy’s previous board membership and advisory experience includes:
Chairman of the Oregon Investment Council, which oversees the investment of the Oregon PERS funds https://www.sondlanddurant.org/katherine-j-durant )
A spokesperson for Read, who has oversight of public investments but does not personally manage relationships with private equity managers, said in the December statement that
the treasurer supported the sanctioning of technology companies
that “facilitate human rights violations and the oppression of journalists by selling technology to authoritarian regimes.”
The spokesperson said that Oregon was a limited partner in private equity fund investments and did not participate in the “selection or operation of private equity portfolio companies” held by it private equity investors.
“We’ve been deeply disturbed by reports about developments concerning NSO Group,” the statement said.
An investigation by the Guardian suggests that
a senior official at the Oregon pension fund was briefed on Novalpina’s desire to buy NSO –
and appears to have indicated to partners there that he supported the deal –
as early as 2018.
Records suggest that Michael Langdon, director of private markets at the Oregon State Treasury’s investment division, met the three founding partners at Novalpina in London on 15 June 2018.
According to a source familiar with the matter, Langdon voiced his support for Novalpina to pursue the acquisition.
A 24 June 2018 email that was sent by a person involved in the talks described Novalpina as discussing the opportunity “in detail” with the private equity firm’s three largest investors, who had voiced “strong support” for the transaction.
At the time, Langdon is said to have already been familiar with NSO and what insiders sometimes called the “noise” – or bad publicity – around the company
because
the Oregon pension fund was also an investor in Francisco Partners,
a California-based firm whose fund previously owned a majority stake in NSO.
“He was very supportive throughout,” said one investor who asked not to be named, describing Langdon’s approach to the Novalpina fund’s takeover of NSO.
A spokesperson for the Oregon treasury declined to answer the Guardian’s questions.
In an emailed statement, the spokesperson said: “Our role as a limited partner means we can’t comment on specifics related to our active investments, and as we have said before, we do not participate in the selection, operation, or control of portfolio companies.”
Concerns about the possible abuse of NSO’s hacking software by its government clients date back to 2016.
By 2018, researchers at Citizen Lab had issued reports that said there appeared to be a “lack of due diligence by NSO Group concerning the sale of their spyware, and widespread misuse of the spyware by several government clients”.
Researchers had delved into allegations that
journalists and human rights activists
in Mexico and the UAE had their phones hacked by governments using Pegasus.
Then, in October 2018, new allegations emerged that a Saudi dissident who was based in Canada, a close associate of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, had been targeted and infected with NSO spyware by a client of the company.
NSO denied the claim. The controversy did not affect the takeover of the Israeli firm by Novalpina’s fund.
Months later, after the acquisition of a majority stake in NSO became public, an announcement of the deal appears to have been sent to Langdon by Stephen Peel, co-founder of Novalpina. The senior Oregon official responded on 21 March 2019: “This is great. Thanks. Let’s keep in touch on this.”
As allegations of misuse of NSO’s technology by the company’s government clients multiplied,
a spokesperson for the Oregon pension fund responded to inquiries from the Guardian by saying
Blah blah blah
it was against the fund’s policy to comment on specific portfolio investments given its role as a limited partner.
It did issue a statement after the Biden administration announced that it was adding NSO to a US blacklist.
spokesperson for Tobias Read said in December that the Oregon treasury had been working with the fund’s new manager, which replaced Novalpina in 2021, to obtain a “full accounting” of the prior fund manager’s investment activities over the past several years,
and had reached out to Oregon’s attorney general on “various legal options”.
The spokesperson did not elaborate on what was meant by “various legal options”.....opinions? Sic.
Novalpina’s three co-founding partners
, Stefan Kowski,
Stephen Peel
and Bastian Lueken,
did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian.
____
'Portland Police Bureau Chief Bob Day acknowledged that investigators don’t know
if there is any link between the damage to downtown businesses
with the library occupation,
which did result in damage to campus buildings."
Ain't cherry picking.
____
"we adopted two black rinos"
Republicans by Any Other Name
"Our family rule is that everyone needs to be present for family dinner, unless you're in Gaza."
"Ayn Rand’s famous novel Atlas Shrugged, signed by the author and gifted to Katy from Gordon.
Hosting Dennis Hastert for a fundraiser, oh the fond memories. And Dick Cheney! The safari twins.
Gordon: " we are opposites in most respects.
Whether it’s food, music, movies or leisure activities,
we joke that if one of us loves it,
the other likely does not."
Yeah, she's mostly honest. Gordon is a duplicitous sleaze laughing at his own jokes and chasing Maids around his hotels.
Delusional?
Wheeler and the Sondlands, PERS, Spyware by the Mossad, oh and buying an Ambassadorship under Trump for $1, 000, 000 in Dark Money.
But I'm no journalist. I'm an Artist.
____
"Not since Neil Goldschmidt has a public figure in Oregon wielded so much power on the national stage.
While Goldschmidt was a masterful politician and literally the political godfather of the Democratic Party in Oregon,
he got very sloppy
on the business side,
which opened up his personal life to intense scrutiny"
'Gordon Sondland has similarly been a masterful on the business side yet become sloppy regarding politics, opening up his business practices to similar scrutiny."
It is noteworthy that Sondland’s wife Katy Durant
served on the Oregon Investment Council (OIC), the body that manages
Oregon’s $90 billion in PERS assets from 2005-2016
11 years.
___
Erasing
My updates
Or is it NSO.
This is where the State Treasurer is supposed to step in and unfortunately for Sondland and Durant,
Democrat Tobias Read has done just the opposite.
Read began by scrubbing away the archive of meetings and minutes as part of a web site overhaul.
This includes key audio from Wilbur Ross, now Commerce Secretary, whose firm has received almost $300 million from the OIC.
Again Durant made the motion to approve the investment, which I am confident Wilbur appreciated.
Let’s now take a look at another example regarding why this archive is so important.
TPG and the OIC’s in Novalpina, a TPG spinoff, Making Oregon Public Employees the largest shareholders in a Cyber Weapon Software Company NSO/Pegasus
After a long career benefiting enormously from Oregon’s investments in TPG, senior partner Stephen Peel started his own fund Novalpina, with a helping hand from TPG.
The OIC in fact became the first and largest investor at almost 25 percent of the entire fund. Here is a link to audio for this November 2017 monthly meeting. You can hear Chair Adams asking all the right questions yet getting little support from other council members, in terms of scrutiny, regarding the investment:
As it turns out they invested more than half the billion dollar fund, including debt, in a cyber weapons firm, NSO. This essentially makes Oregon Public Employees the NOS’s largest shareholder.
Here is a series of visuals, note that acccording to Private Equity HUB Novalpina used Brooklands Capital Strategies, a division of TPG, on the fundraising.
Not even the Willamette Week has reported on this investment.
good question for Gordon Sondland on his special mission to the Ukraine to get to the bottom of the election interference scandal is whether Novalpina and its portfolio company played a role.
Novalpina’s entry into the Cyber Weapon software business was greased by OIC funds and TPG’s big entry into security software when it purchased a majority stake in McAfee from Intel in September, 2016.
NSO’s previous owner was Francisco Partners, another private equity firm in which the OIC has invested almost $500 million.
Here is a recap of the NSO sale from Francisco partners to Novalpina per Wikipedia. Note the source.
Whether or note Novalpina leveraged this up with debt is not clear.
What is clear is that Oregon’s public employees are its largest shareholder.
One More Example of Sondland and Durant’s Conflicts of Interest, Elliott Broidy’s Markstone Capital
The OIC invested $50 million in 2004 in Eliott Broidy’s new Markstone Capital and during Durant’s time on the Council significant issues regarding problems with the fund were discussed.
These included a major pay for play scandal
brought by a New York Public Pension.
Broidy is also now the subject of a Department of Justice Investigation.
Sondland is a major investor with Broidy is a security surveillance firm, as reported by Nigel Jaquiss of Willamette Week.
What Jaquiss and other Journalists have not discussed is
Durant’s role on the OIC overseeing the Markstone Capital investment
while sensitive discussions were held.
In 2015 while Durant was Chair of the OIC an additional $112 million was invested in Endeavour Capital.
Durant’s husband is invested in three Endeavour Capital funds per his January 2018 Public Financial Disclosure Report.
Regarding Sondland and President Trump, many banks simply won’t lend to hotels because they are high risk loans.
What Gordon probably never anticipated is that all his property debt can be analyzed in great detail given that the banks he used have securitized the loans into commecial mortgage pools and sold these to investors.
Each such sale requires a prospectus, filed with the SEC, that provides very detailed information on each property, for example the Paramount Hotel assumes an occupancy rate of 87 percent. In addition, almost halve his revenue comes from food and beverage.
So let’s start with this deal involving a mortgage pool created by Goldman Sachs on February 6, 2015, which by the way does a lot of business with the OIC and Durant is now Chair, that is 2015, which shows Sondland’s $25 million mortgage on the Paramount Hotel, which was previously securitized by JP Morgan. In the prospectus Goldman claims the occupancy rate is 87 percent. Of course this is critical for a hotel and why again many banks will simply not lend to hotels, given the high risk that occupancy should decline sharply. Also noteworthy is that the President’s primary lendor, Deutsche Bank, President Trump’s primary lendor, was a key player in the issue.
Of course an obvious question might be, how has Gordon’s business mix changed since he joined the Trump administration.
For example, are there most government events being held there, etc. This would be a good public records request since he is still the owner of the properties.
Simply saying he is not actively managing them is not adequate.
Sondland’s Provenance Hotels recently filed an ethical complaint against Democratic Congressmen Earl Blumenhauer, and was allowed to do a major opinion piece in the Oregonian, after
Blumenhaeur suggested consumers boycott
Sondland’s Hotels
given his refusal
to testify to Congress.
One food vendor, salt and straw ice cream, has already backed out. Let’s just say chances are good the commercial lending officer at Washington Trust will be watching closely tomorrow.
This ethical complaint is particularly interesting because
after years of frustration with Sondland’s wife Katy Durant not disclosing conflicts of interest
while in charge of Oregon’s PERS investments,
I filed a complaint with the State Ethics division.
I am after all investment advisor to approximately 25 PERS participants.
Simply putting your name on art exhibits and using a foundation as a PR tool is also bad business, and worse politics.
My advice to Sondland is to look at the retirement plan for your 615 employees,
to which you contributed $60,000 as the employer contribution in your most recent filing,
that’s about $97 per employee for the year.
when you are in Europe please try not to personify the “Ugly American.” That joke you tell about asking what time it is, and someone responding no, is a language thing.
It’s reported your father was a Russian citizen before fleeing to Germany.
As you should know, that is a language thing and all you do is display ignorance to slavic languages when you tell that joke.
In Russian the answer would be nyet, the same thing.
It means I don’t have the time."
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