Dec. 12–On most days, hedge fund managers, Wall Street lawyers, builders and cable industry execs wouldn’t want to be caught in the same room with New York’s hard-driving Attorney General EliotSpitzer.
That wasn’t the case yesterday when a slew of New York’s biggest financial players corralled as much as $100,000 each on Spitzer’s behalf. By the end of the political fund-raising lunch at the Sheraton Manhattan Hotel, Spitzer had raked in more than $2 million, even from people working in industries he regulates.
Top donors for yesterday’s event included Cablevision Systems Corp. president James Dolan, real estate developers Edward and Howard Milstein, and Miramax Film Corp. co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, according to the program.
Some of the more than 680 attendees at the lunch, with tennis legend John McEnroe as keynote speaker, also included famed hedge-fund manager and short-seller Jim Chanos, who brought to light the problems at Enron Corp.
Labor union leaders also figured prominently. The Spitzer 2006 campaign is expected to focus on a run for the New York governorship. Spitzer has yet to declare his candidacy but had already raised $2 million in 2003 prior to yesterday.
This year, Spitzer’s investigations have included some of the biggest mutual fund companies and hedge funds that have profited from special trading arrangements.
Despite his role as top prosecutor, Spitzer said it doesn’t mean that “there can’t be or shouldn’t be contributions from anybody within that sector” and said his campaign committee has “a very careful vetting process” to avoid accepting gifts from donors under scrutiny by his office.
Other observers noted that it would be problematic if Spitzer took money from executives he was investigating but in these cases, there didn’t seem to be conflicts. “A prosecutor should not raise money from an officer of a company that’s under investigation,” said Stephen Gillers, vice dean of the New York University School of Law. But just having jurisdiction over an industry has “never been a basis for forbidding fund-raising.”
Chanos declined to comment about his contributions. State election records show that he has regularly given to Spitzer’s campaigns.
Bloomberg News contributed to this report.
—–
To see more of Newsday, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.newsday.com
(c) 2003, Newsday, Melville, N.Y. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
HOT, CVC, DIS, ENRNQ,
