New York Post – IT doesn’t take much to get Harvey Pitt going on the subject of Eliot Spitzer. The former head of the Securities & Exchange Commission clearly isn’t one of the New York Attorney General’s biggest fans.
“Eliot Spitzer is New York’s AG, and you know what that stands for – Aspiring Governor,” Pitt recently quipped to a small group of journalists who had joined him for a meal at the 21 Club.
The Brooklyn-born Pitt, now a Washington-based consultant, has a lot to say about things like the safety of hedge funds (they aren’t); the rights of journalists (the SEC shouldn’t subpoena them); and changes that need to be made to the Sarbanes-Oxley financial disclosure act.
“Eliot Spitzer isn’t really concerned about public investors,” Pitt continued. “He’s concerned about moving on to higher public office.” And, says Pitt, he’s using big companies as “whipping boys.”
Pitt says that Spitzer “extracted” a huge settlement from Merrill Lynch and then put the money into the state coffers rather than return it to investors. “Why? Because he wasn’t concerned about investors,” said Pitt.
