The hottest potato in Vermont | The Vermont Political Observer.
You wouldn’t know that from hearing him talk to Seven Days’ Paul Heintz.
Um, no. That’s exactly wrong.
These kinds of deals HAVE to be regulated. They HAVE to have measurable goals. The government MUST keep an eye on the henhouse. If you’re putting “a certain amount of trust” in Bill Stenger or GlobalFoundries or Keurig Green Mountain or even Ben and Jerry’s, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.
Was this Shumlin’s attitude toward CGI, the contractor that screwed up the state health exchange? Maybe it was. And maybe that’s why Vermont Health Connect was an endless, slow-rolling botch.
Shumlin and his people are patting themselves on the back for transferring oversight from the obviously inadequate Agency of Commerce and Community Development to the Department of Financial Regulation — in December 2014, more than six years after the fraudulent scheme began. And nearly four years after Jay Peak’s controller, John Carpenter, left the company because Stenger was giving him vague answers and withholding financial information from him. And three years after a company that expedites the EB-5 process cut ties with the Stenger/Quiros operation because things weren’t adding up.
And a year after the Securities and Exchange Commission opened its investigation into the scheme.
Shumlin’s been a-spinnin’, but the front-runner for Most Outrageous Claim is none other than Our Eternal General.
Attorney General Bill Sorrell said last Thursday that, but for Donegan’s work, not only might the state not have caught on, but the federal charges may not have materialized either.
Oh, puh-leeze. The feds were on this case long before Sorrell or Shumlin or Pat Moulton awoke from their slumbers. As is so often the case, Sorrell’s got his head wedged firmly up his own fundament. And thinks it smells nice.
“We said, ‘This is what we’ve got: We’ve got fraud,'” Donegan said.
Okay. September, October, November, December, January, February, March, and half of April go by before the “fraud” is revealed. And that, only after the SEC raided Jay Peak.
So if state officials were sure there was fraud seven months ago, why did they keep their lips zipped?
Oh, I see. You kept it quiet in hopes that Bill Stenger could pull a rabbit out of his hat and get Q Burke done before the whole thing went kerblooey.
Nice of the Governor to make that decision on behalf of the investors. Somehow I think they would have liked to know ASAP that they were in bed with a fraudster.
This kind of sunny denial and blame-shifting will not stand. We already know enough to see through the Governor’s efforts to burnish his own image. It’s only going to get worse as more information comes out.
Peter Shumlin has done a lot of good as Governor. But the shorthand version of his tenure, in the end, is likely to boil down to four things: Tropical Storm Irene, Vermont Health Connect, Jerry Dodge, and Bill Stenger.
Only one of those four is a positive.
Pat Moulton has bounced around state government like a pinball. It’s part of the reason for Shumlin’s monumental failures. He moved people into positions they really aren’t qualified for, and taxpayers pay the price. Shumlin continues to be the emperor who wears no clothes. If only those bears would have been faster.
It’s also a problem with ACCD’s mission. It is supposed to foster business development, and it’s responsible for overseeing the state’s grant programs. This conflict has been addressed, belatedly, with EB-5, but not with other state business incentives. Like the Enterprise Fund, for example.
Hey! We are doing what we can to make Vermont a more “business-friendly” state! If we don’t back off this investigation, the Wall Street Journal and Chamber of Commerce are not going to change their opinion of Vermont.