A Presidential Pardon for the ‘Junk Bond King’

Mike Bloomberg will appear onstage for the first time at a Democratic debate tonight, and Senator Elizabeth Warren is ready: “Primary voters curious about how each candidate will take on Donald Trump can get a live demonstration of how we each take on an egomaniac billionaire,” she tweeted. (Want this in your inbox each morning? Sign up here.)

Inside Michael Milken’s pardon

A reprieve for the “junk bond king”: Mr. Milken was among the “who’s who of white-collar criminals” pardoned by President Trump yesterday. In a statement, the White House called him “one of America’s greatest financiers” whose “innovative work greatly expanded access to capital for emerging companies.”

A long lobbying effort on behalf of Mr. Milken finally overturned his 1990 securities fraud conviction, for which he served 22 months in prison. (Read the judge’s explanation of the sentencing at the time.) The White House published a list of 33 high-profile names who supported Mr. Milken’s cause, including: Tom Barrack of Colony Capital; the Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo; Rudy Giuliani, who led the case against Mr. Milken in the 1980s; Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner; the media mogul Rupert Murdoch; Sean Parker, the Napster founder and former Facebook executive; the hedge fund billionaire John Paulson; the activist investor Nelson Peltz; and David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group.

The NYT’s Jim Stewart wrote the book on Mr. Milken: His 1992 “Den of Thieves” chronicled the financier’s exploits at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the height of the “greed is good” 1980s. “It’s not hard to fathom why Mr. Milken’s saga would resonate with Mr. Trump,” Jim wrote yesterday in his analysis of the pardon. An excerpt:

Seen as an underdog, even a very wealthy and well-connected one, Mr. Milken has long inspired a counternarrative that he was a victim of a media and Wall Street establishment jealous of his wealth and success. However unfounded in fact, that version of reality has now gotten a presidential stamp of approval.

What next? Mr. Milken’s conviction came with a lifetime ban from the securities industry, although he paid $47 million in 1998 to settle a complaint from the S.E.C. that he had violated the order by advising friends, including Mr. Murdoch, on transactions. Could he now be tempted to get back into finance? “Today, that is the farthest thing from his mind,” Geoffrey Moore, Milken’s senior adviser, tells us. “He’s fully dedicated to continuing his lifelong crusade to cure cancer and other life-threatening diseases.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/business/dealbook/milken-trump-pardon.html