Sunday, September 09, 2007

There's No Business Like Hsu's Business   [Mark Hemingway]

I keep wondering how the Norman Hsu-Hillary Clinton fundraising scandal is going to play out and this NYT story is eye popping. Basically, Hsu was giving Democrats hundreds of thousands of dollars and nobody has any idea where it was coming from:

The records show that Components Ltd., a company controlled by Mr. Hsu that has no obvious business purpose and appears to exist only on paper, has paid a total of more than $100,000 to at least nine people who made campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton and others through Mr. Hsu.

[SNIP]

On campaign finance disclosure forms, he listed his employer as one of a half-dozen companies, some of them with names that seemed to change with each retelling. On some forms, the company was Components Limited or Next Components or Next Consultants. Other times it was Next Limited or Consultants Limited. And his title was different from one form to the next, sometimes appearing as president or managing director, other times as consultant, supplier or partner.

And that's just a small taste of the article. It also notes that in addition to his bankruptcy and fraud charges in the US in 1990, he was forced into bankruptcy in Hong Kong in 1998 and he emerged from bankruptcy there only last year. My spidey sense tells me that this story is not over by a long shot.

UPDATE: A reader sends in a great WSJ story on Hsu I somehow missed that ran on Saturday. Among other revelations, the article notes that Hsu was kidnapped by men connected to Asian gangs in San Francisco back in 1990. Who is this guy?

09/09 07:35 PMShare