Once Upon A Time In The Bush Family Series
Prince Neil Bush Strikes Again
by Evelyn J. Pringle
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 22, 2004



 

Once upon a time, Prince Neil Bush and his business partners from the JNB oil company caused the collapse of the Silverado Savings & Loan by ripping off $200 million.  When all was said and done, a bill totaling $1.3 billion was left for taxpayers to pay. 

Because Neil's father George was the Vice-King of the Kingdom he was able to conceal the news of Silverado's collapse, and its cost to taxpayers, until after he became a full-fledged King in the1988 election.

The only thing that Neil seemed to learn from the whole Silverado-JNB fiasco was that taxpayers were easy prey.  Being that the scam worked so well the first time around, he decided to give it another shot with a new oil company, Apex Energy.

When Neil bailed out of JNB, leaving his partners with all the debt, I doubt that he told them that he had already been scheming with a new fairy-godfather to form Apex.  In true Bush style, Neil wasn’t willing to risk much dough. “He invested $3,000 of his own money and got $2.3 million from two companies run by his father's friend Louis Marx,” according to the Washington Post. (December 28, 2003)

However, the $2.3 million didn't exactly come from Louis Marx either.  It came from loans obtained through the Federal Small Business Administration.  With Neil’s recent history, one might wonder how he could secure a loan at all.  The answer's easy, by using Marx as a front man, and as pointed out by Oklahoma Independent Media on Oct 17, 2004, “It surely helped to have a woman who headed the SBA who was appointed by Neil's daddy, President GHW Bush to get such a hefty loan.”

Prince Neil's Back In The Money

Of course, it should come as no surprise that an expert oilman like Neil would refuse to work for peanuts.  He “used Marx's money to pay himself a salary of $160,000, and he sold a Wyoming gas lease that he owned to Apex for $150,000," noted the Washington Post. 

By all accounts, Neil's financial future looked prosperous once again.

However, as we've seen in the past, looks can be deceiving when it comes to Neil's get-rich-quick schemes.  Before Apex even got off the ground, the media began reporting that the SBA loans had been processed through companies that were insolvent themselves.  Upon learning of this situation, the SBA gave Apex 30 months to liquidate its assets and repay the loans.

Never one to hang around when the going gets rough, Neil decided it was time to get out of Dodge.  He left the debt-ridden Apex for Louis to worry about, knowing full well that if the company couldn't be sold for more than it owed, that taxpayers would be stuck paying the remainder of the money owed.  As an insider, he also knew that company's only asset was the worthless oil lease that Apex had bought from him.

The $2.3 million had come from a loan program geared to help “high risk start-up companies.”  In hindsight, Apex certainly met that criteria.   In less than 2 years, the company folded and the deadline to liquidate came and went.  Since there were no assets to sell, the loans went unpaid, and the taxpayers were left holding the bag.

King George had been successful in keeping the Silverado fiasco hidden until after the 1988 election, and he managed to keep the Apex scandal under wraps until after the 1992 election.  When the SBA gave Apex 30 months to liquidate its assets, it scheduled the deadline just past the date of the election, so that once again, taxpayers wouldn’t know anything about their newly acquired debt until after they voted.

Poor Prince Neil -- Unemployed Again

After he bailed out of Apex, Neil was unemployed again.  But it wasn't long before he was rescued by another rich fairy-godfather.  “Bill Daniels, a multimillionaire cable TV baron who raised $330,000 in 1987 for George H.W. Bush's presidential campaign, hired Neil to a $60,000 job at TransMedia Communications,” the Washington Post reported. (December 23, 2003

According to a Daniels representative, he "thought Neil deserved a second chance."  A second chance?  Lets do the math here.  By the time Daniels hired him, Neil had already had 3 chances:

1.      JNB Exploration
2.      Silverado Savings & Loan
3.      Apex Energy

That is Neil Bush's resume, period.  What qualifications or experience did he possess that would and him a job with a cable company at a salary of $60,000 a year, which by today‘s standards would be about $90,000.

The company itself couldn't describe his job duties. At the time that Neil was hired, Peter Wehner of Colorado Business magazine called TransMedia and asked what Neil would be doing at the company, "I'm trying to find a title for him, if you want to know the truth," said Dick Barron, the company’s president, "He'll be learning the business, basically."

It sure didn't take much research to find out why he was picked for the job.  In addition to being a large campaign fund raiser for King George, Daniels had also been doing some heavy-duty lobbying for deregulation of the telecommunications industry, and against regulation of the cable industry.  

The decision to give the President’s son a job in the industry was brilliant.  And it paid off big time for Daniels.  In fact, it probably paid off better than all the money spent on lobbying.  Because, according to Texans for Public Justice, Neil was still working at the cable company in 1992, when the old man stepped up to the plate and vetoed the legislation to regulate cable companies that had been passed.

It’s too bad we all can't have a pocket full of rich fairy-godfathers.

How Much Loot Did Neil Take Us For?

Well, lets see.  Less than 4 years after we were socked with the $1.3 billion from Silverado, we were handed another $2.2 million bill for Apex.   Neil made off with about $320,000, and to the best of my knowledge, he never even saw the inside of a police station, much less a jail cell.  Eat your heart out Martha Stewart.

The moral of this story is that if you want to rip off taxpayers and stay out of jail, change your name to Bush and steal big!

The End

Evelyn J. Pringle is an Ohio-based investigative journalist, and a columnist for Independent Media TV. She can be reached at: e.pringle@sbcglobal.net. (C) Copyright 2004 Evelyn J. Pringle.

Other Articles by Evelyn J. Pringle

* Prince Neil Bush & Silverado
* The Truth About Importing Prescription Drugs
* Why Are We In Iraq?: Bush Family $$$ Signs
* The Bush Crony Full-Employment Act of 2003
 

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