Columbus Dispatch- Terrence W. Gasper returned to the stand yesterday in the federal fraud trial of investment manager Mark D. Lay and described meeting a Cleveland-area broker at the Old Bag ofNails Pub in Worthington in 2004.
Gasper, the disgraced former chief financial officer of the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation, described how broker Patrick White gave him cash and had once said he could give Gasper a $75,000-a-year job for life if he supported a hedge fund that made money for White.
“Sounds like a bribe to me,” Richard M. Kerger, one of Lay’s defense attorneys, said to Gasper on the stand. “Sounds like a bribe to me, too,” Gasper replied.
The investment run by Lay’s MDL Capital Management already had lost about $30 million. But a month after the meeting, Gasper approved sinking another $100 million in state money into the fund after an initial $100 million in 2003.
The fund eventually lost $216 million.
In new revelations from an investigation begun nearly 2 1/2 years ago into scandals at the bureau and in state government, Gasper described the political, personal and possibly criminal reasons behind why the MDL investment was funded and why it wasn’t shut down sooner, as one bureau official had wanted.
