Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee failed to make public a dozen stock purchases in a little-known Chattanooga real estate company as required under U.S. Senate rules, according to the Wall Street Journal. The stock dealings involved millions of dollars and resulted in his most profitable investments.
In one previously unknown purchase, Mr. Corker purchased between $1 million and $5 million in shares of the firm, CBL & Associates Properties Inc., in late 2011 and sold them five months later for a 42% gain. A pair of purchases in 2009 in accounts in the name of his daughters likely netted more than $1 million, though in that case the exact gain is impossible to calculate.
The trades are among the CBL stock purchases that Mr. Corker disclosed only recently after questions from The Wall Street Journal about apparent discrepancies in his Senate financial-disclosure reports. Congressional ethics rules require lawmakers to make public their financial investments in broad ranges each year.
Some of Mr. Corker’s newly disclosed trades came during a period of heightened scrutiny of financial investments by members of Congress and as Mr. Corker was preparing to run for re-election in 2012.
In a written statement to the Journal last week, Mr. Corker said he was “extremely disappointed in the filing errors that were made in these earlier reports where the accounting firm mistakenly used realized gain/loss methodology instead of the Senate financial disclosure guidelines.”
As a result of the mistakes, Mr. Corker said, “in a few cases, only the sale and gain or loss of the transaction was reported. As a result of this inquiry, and after completing a full review, we are correcting this oversight.”
…There are no penalties for making fixes to disclosures, a frequent occurrence, because ethics regulators want to encourage lawmakers to correct mistakes.
The new disclosures are the latest twist in Mr. Corker’s history with CBL, a publicly traded company that he knows well. After college, he worked for a company that constructed buildings for CBL. He later started his own construction company and then invested in shopping malls and office buildings. Several CBL executives have donated to his campaigns. CBL didn’t respond to requests for comment.
…There are no penalties for making fixes to disclosures, a frequent occurrence, because ethics regulators want to encourage lawmakers to correct mistakes.
The new disclosures are the latest twist in Mr. Corker’s history with CBL, a publicly traded company that he knows well. After college, he worked for a company that constructed buildings for CBL. He later started his own construction company and then invested in shopping malls and office buildings. Several CBL executives have donated to his campaigns. CBL didn’t respond to requests for comment.