More Evidence Emerges Proving What a Shameless, Crony Fraud Evan Bayh Is

Evan Bayh, the former Democratic senator from Indiana and current Senate candidate, has at least $1 million in holdings with a Bermuda-based insurance company, Athene, that has a business model that a class action lawsuit is challenging as a bait-and-switch scam.

Athene’s business plan, the suit claims, is to buy up the annuities of retirees that had previously been invested in bonds and blue chip stocks, and instead pump their money into the risky bets of a private equity firm. That firm turns out to be Apollo Global Management ― where Bayh is a highly paid senior adviser ― which actually owns Athene, so if the gamble pays off, Athene’s parent company gets rich. If it flops, the retirees take the hit.

Private equity’s push into the once-boring annuity industry was the subject of a 2013 Bloomberg story, which found Apollo leading the way. “It’s a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose game,” said Lawrence Rybka, CEO of wealth-advisory firm ValMark Securities. 

Bayh has been working for Apollo as a senior adviser for public policy since early 2011, shortly after he retired from the Senate. On the personal financial disclosure he filed with the Federal Election Commission earlier this month in order to run for Senate in 2016, he states that he has received between $5.7 million and $20.9 million worth of assets in the firm. He lists his holdings in Athene as valued at between $1 million and $5 million. 

In 2010, when Bayh was still a senator, he went to battle on behalf of Apollo and other money managers who were working desperately to thwart attempts to close or narrow what’s known as the “carried interest loophole,” which allows private equity and hedge fund managers to pay bargain-basement tax rates. 

With Bayh’s help, the effort to close the loophole was derailed. An analysis of Apollo’s security filings suggests that the maintenance of the loophole has saved executives tens of millions of dollars on their tax bills since then. 

Bayh’s rapacious grab for cash since his retirement has been extraordinary even by Clintonian standards, but it is made all the more poignant by the poetic bromides he offered on his way out.

“I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” Bayh told Ezra Klein in October 2010. He said he wanted to find work where he could come home and tell his wife, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.”

We have since learned ― thanks to the Associated Press, which obtained his Senate schedule ― that by the time he was having this heady conversation, he had already been meeting with executives at Apollo, as well as the brass at the oil company Marathon and the law firm and lobby shop McGuire Woods. He went on to take jobs with all three, joining Apollo, sitting on Marathon’s board of directors, and working as a strategic adviser at McGuire Woods.

Earlier this month, Bayh warned his supporters in a fundraising appeal that the Koch brothers, Charles and David, were hell-bent on making sure Young won the Indiana race.

While the claim is true, Bayh makes an awkward messenger: The Koch brothers are clients of McGuireWoods, where Bayh is still a partner.

“Evan Bayh was paid by Koch Industries at his lobbying firm as recently as 2016 ― and he will work for them after Election Day whether he wins or loses,” said a source who lobbies for Koch Industries, asking for anonymity in order to speak openly about somebody else on their payroll. “He calls Koch names, but he’s grateful for the retainer they paid him, and Koch knows it.”

Bayh, announcing his retirement, delivered a sermon in The New York Times that was filled with regret for the decay of the Senate, complete with hopeful recommendations for reform. But what Bayh actually did while in office has only further degraded the chamber. He used his final year to cast industry-friendly votes while interviewing for jobs with those same industries. Then he left office and became, in a very short amount of time, a wildly rich man worth somewhere between $13.9 million and $48 million. Citizens United has nothing to say about that.

A few months after helping kill the bill, Bayh was literally sleeping at the Manhattan home of an Apollo executive, according to a Senate schedule the AP obtained. It was one of several meetings with the firm he’d joined shortly after leaving the Senate. (His spokesman told the AP he was staying with a friend.)

If Bayh were truly looking for an “honorable line of work,” working for a company that bought up the retirement accounts of the elderly, shifted them to risky investments and hit them with big fees is a strange way to go about it. 

Here’s my related post from earlier this week in case you missed it: Democratic Senate Candidate Evan Bayh Represents Everything Broken, Corrupt and Wrong With America.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger