A key backer of this bill, Senator Dianne Feinstein, used her position as chair of the Senate Military Construction subcommittee to send so many Iraqi military construction contracts to her husband’s two construction companies from 2001 to 2005 that he made close to $400 million in war profiteering cash. A cash windfall the U.S. Senate kept quiet about.
http://www.wnd.com/2007/03/40845/Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has abruptly walked away from her responsibilities with the Senate Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee after a report linked her votes to the financial well-being of her husband’s companies, which received billions of dollars worth of military construction contracts she approved.
As reported in Metroactive, an online report from the Silicon Valley, Feinstein’s resignation followed six years of subcommittee work during which time her alleged conflict of interest stemmed from her husband Richard C. Blum’s ownership of Perini Corp. and URS Corp.
According to those reports, from 2001 to 2005, URS earned $792 million from military construction and environmental cleanup work approved by MILCON, while Perini collected $759 million for the same.
Feinstein’s annual Public Financial Disclosure Reports record sizeable family income from investments in the Framingham, Mass.-based Perini and the San Francisco-located URS. But there was no acknowledgment of any conflict of interest, according to Metroactive, a “Northern California meta-site”
The report also showed URS’ military construction work in 2000 was only $24 million, but the next year, when Feinstein took over as MILCON chair, military construction earned URS $185 million. Additionally, its military construction architectural and engineering revenue rose from $108,000 in 2000 to $142 million in 2001, a thousand-fold increase.
In late 2005, Blum sold 5.5 million URS shares, worth $220 million, the report said.
Hmmmm...
