{"id":182612,"date":"2015-07-23T21:58:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-24T02:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/07\/23\/so-not-a-surprise-33\/"},"modified":"2015-07-23T21:58:00","modified_gmt":"2015-07-24T02:58:00","slug":"so-not-a-surprise-33","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/07\/23\/so-not-a-surprise-33\/","title":{"rendered":"So Not a Surprise"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Pension Trustees of New Jersey decided that the huge private equity fees being paid to Christie supporters needed to be investigated.<\/div>\n

Now we discover that the Christie administration is slow walking the investigation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was preparing to launch his presidential campaign this spring, he faced a big potential headache: New Jersey pension officials had voted to investigate secret<\/a> taxpayer fees that the Republican governor\u2019s administration paid to Wall Street firms. But Christie\u2019s administration may have found a stopgap solution: stall.<\/p>\n

Four months after state pension trustees\u2019 vote<\/a>, the retirement system\u2019s chairman told International Business Times that Christie\u2019s aides have so far prevented the probe from getting off the ground.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are throwing up obstacles, as many as they can find,\u201d said Tom Bruno, who leads the N.J. Public Employees’ Retirement System’s board of trustees. Bruno says Christie\u2019s Treasury Department has prevented the probe from going forward until Christie\u2019s appointees on the State Investment Council give their blessing.<\/p>\n

The investigation was supposed to evaluate the higher fees that have accompanied the administration\u2019s shift of billions of dollars of pension money into hedge funds, private equity and other so-called \u201calternative\u201d investments. Despite federal<\/a> and New Jersey \u201cpay to play\u201d rules, some of those fees have been paid<\/a> to firms whose executives donated to GOP groups affiliated with Christie. But with New Jersey having no independently elected auditor, treasurer or attorney general, pensioners must ultimately rely on the Christie administration to approve an investigation of its own decisions affecting thousands of retirees.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Pension trustees demanded the audit in April following a series of reports from International Business Times spotlighting a massive increase in pension fees paid to private financial firms — some of whose executives have made campaign contributions to Republican groups affiliated with Christie. In March, IBTimes reported<\/a> that the Christie administration had failed to disclose potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in fees the state had been paying since Christie took office in January 2010.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

Last year, after the initial disclosures, Christie\u2019s then-State Investment Council Chairman Robert Grady resigned<\/a> amid questions about political favoritism in awarding pension contracts. This year, Christie\u2019s state treasurer, Andrew Sidamon-Eristoff, resigned in June, a month after a testy legislative hearing in which state lawmakers raised questions about the undisclosed fees paid by the pension system under Christie.<\/p>\n

The pension trustees\u2019 push for a full audit of the pension system follows moves by the Christie administration that appeared to obscure or conceal details of the system\u2019s finances and oversight decisions.<\/p>\n

After financial experts raised questions<\/a> about the accuracy of the pension performance data in 2014, Christie\u2019s administration rejected<\/a> repeated open records requests for documents that would show how it calculated the figures. When in the same year it was revealed that Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker donated $10,000 to the New Jersey Republican Party months before his financial firm received a New Jersey pension deal, Christie\u2019s aides blocked<\/a> the release of the findings of the government\u2019s pay-to-play investigation until after Baker\u2019s closely fought election.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in the pension system\u2019s most recent annual report, Christie\u2019s aides changed<\/a> the way they tabulated pension management fees to make it seem as if the fees had decreased — when, in fact, they had jumped to $600 million. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

The state\u2019s investment strategy has not, however, generated higher returns for taxpayers and retirees. Last year, a study by Wilshire Associates found that the New Jersey pension fund\u2019s investment return has trailed the median for pension funds throughout the country. <\/p>\n

\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, however, the State Investment Council said<\/a> the pension\u2019s returns have been lower than expected so far this year.  <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I so hope that he ends up in jail, but given his background as a former US Attorney, I fear that he has surrounded himself with plausible deniability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Pension Trustees of New Jersey decided that the huge private equity fees being paid to Christie supporters needed to be investigated. Now we discover that the Christie administration is slow walking the investigation: When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was preparing to launch his presidential campaign this spring, he faced a big potential headache: …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,978,977],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-politics","category-presidential-campaign"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182612"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}