CalPERS is getting a lot of bad publicity these days. The reason for this is that it has been found out that the firms top investment staffs were accepting many luxury perks like private jet trips from other firms that they were doing business with. These trips were obviously not disclosed publicly.
Robert Fellmeth, executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego said that, “Not only should the public have been told that these trips were going on, the public should have been stopping them. The investment staff shouldn’t be getting anything from anybody. … There is no position in government more amenable to bribery and where the damage is more serious. This is where the retirement money for hundreds of thousands of people is going to go.”
The manager, Joncarlo Mark especially made a lot of such trips. The spokesperson for the company however say that these trips were part of the contract with the firms. These corruption chargers came into light when former CalPERS board member Alfred Villalobos was accused of using his connections to start a multimillion dollar kickback scheme at the pension fund. The firms whose names have come up as the ones giving these bribes are large private equity firms such as Yucaipa, the Carlyle Group and Oak Hill Capital Partners among others.
Via: LA Times
