Robert A. Kindler—Global head of Mergers and Acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, former global head of M&A at JPMorgan Chase.79 Ironically, Kindler boasted a vanity license plate for his Porsche that read “2BIG2FAIL.”80 Morgan Stanley would receive $10 billion from TARP.81
Edward J. Mathias—Managing director at the Carlyle Group, former member of management committee and board of directors at T. Rowe Price.82 The Carlyle Group grabbed $154 million in TARP funds for an affiliate.83
William I. Jacobs—Former senior executive vice president and chief operating officer at MasterCard International.84
Amelia founded BTG along with business partner Jody Greenstone Miller. The company is essentially a temp firm for specialized and highly skilled employees. BTG proudly positions itself as a mechanism for the “gig economy,” where people are hired for part-time jobs rather than full-time employment. As Miller put it in the Wall Street Journal, “The surge in temp hiring is not a sign of a malfunctioning economy. It is the face of the future.”85 Curiously, this business model runs totally contrary to Senator Warren’s positions. Warren has been highly critical of the “gig economy,” arguing that part-time workers rarely get the benefits or the workplace authority that they would as full-time employees.86
In its early years, the firm struggled. Executives admitted that they had to be “extremely resourceful” in order to find new business.87 Executive recruitment and the temp business are largely about corporate connections. As Clare Malone of the Daily Beast pointed out, BTG is “a hybrid headhunting and consulting firm—industries whose bread and butter is leveraging connections.”88 Now they appeared to have some in abundance.
In 2009, BTG had two hundred people in its talent pool available for hire, just $4 million in revenue, and only one salesperson. By 2012, BTG had 1,800 independent professionals in the network and almost triple the revenue, at over $11 million.89 As we will see, they were doing business with some of the largest corporations in the country, as well as government agencies.
From chair of the TARP oversight committee, Warren moved to the White House in September 2010 when President Obama appointed her as assistant to the president and special advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury. Her new job focused on setting up a consumer protection bureau.90
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mortgage meltdown, and all the instability that went with it, there was a natural appeal for such a bureau. President Obama and congressional Democrats were soon on board. Because it had been Warren’s idea, she was the natural person to play a central role in establishing the organization and running it.91
The new $550 million agency would have enormous power.92 It was created to enforce rules on banks, collection agencies, Wall Street brokerage firms, credit unions, payday lenders, student loan servicers, and others. As the Treasury secretary at the time, Timothy Geithner, put it, “It got the authority to write and enforce consumer rules for much of the financial system.”93
Warren was eager to establish direct lines of communication with the executives of the most powerful financial firms in the country. Her first assignment to one staffer, Will Sealy, was “collecting the cell phone number for every Wall Street CEO.”94
In her new role, Warren was publicly blunt and aggressive when describing corporate America and the failures of corporate executives. “Wall Street CEOs, the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs, still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them,” she said during her speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2012. “Does anyone here have a problem with that?”95
However, privately she offered a softer, more friendly tone in her communications with the large Wall Street firms. Indeed, she seemed eager to work with the same titans that she was lambasting in public. “You all gave us a great deal to think about, and we are all appreciative,” she wrote to Richard Davis, the president and CEO of U.S. Bancorp, in a March 2011 email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. “I value your help—and your friendship—more than you know.” Communication with the CEOs of major Wall Street firms was in “stark contrast to the battle that [was] waged in public.”96 Warren has met in private with Wall Street moguls that she publicly criticizes. This duality in her public utterances and private tone continued well into her tenure in the U.S. Senate. In July 2017, she joined a private donor retreat held at the Martha’s Vineyard home of Robert Wolf, the former UBS Investment Bank CEO.97 Wolf told the New York Times: “I think she is very different in a conversation than when she’s on the stump.” She also held private meetings with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.98 In public, she has excoriated Dimon and pointedly asked for his resignation from the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s board of directors.99
Elizabeth Warren’s softer tone in private occurred while her daughter Amelia was building BTG.
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Warren’s daughter Amelia is married to Sushil Tyagi, who moved to the United States from India after studying civil engineering in Delhi. Amelia and Sushil met at Wharton Business School while pursuing their MBAs. Sushil had been in the United States for a while, and had studied at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the University of California at Berkeley.100 Sushil Tyagi is a somewhat mysterious figure. He is generally media-shy and appears in few publicly available Warren family photographs. And he enjoys business ties in India and elsewhere that are hard to trace.
Elizabeth Warren is close to Sushil. She mentions him on her website and credits him in the acknowledgments of the book she wrote with Amelia called All Your Worth, stating, “Sushil Tyagi offered tremendous support and intelligent insight.”101 Warren recounts in her memoir attending Sushil’s brother’s wedding in India, but offers scant information about the Tyagi family. Indeed, finding details about Tyagi’s background is quite difficult. Warren and her husband, Bruce Mann, also have some familiarity with Sushil’s business activities. In December 2009, they served as witnesses for a power of attorney corporate document he filed in India.102
Since his marriage into the Warren family, Sushil has been involved in a series of curious—even troubling—business ventures around the world. Tyagi runs Tricolor Films, which formerly boasted a small website with few details of his activities.103 In 2004, he was an executive producer on an Indian film called Hari Om, produced with a company called Tips Industries, which is run by Kumar and Ramesh Taurani. The two brothers are well known in Indian film circles; in 1997, Ramesh was accused of hiring a hit man to take out a film rival named Gulshan.104
But Sushil Tyagi has demonstrated a willingness to work with global bad actors in business ventures.
Tyagi was the producer on a 2008 film funded by the Iranian government. The film was called The Song of Sparrows and was directed by Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi. The film’s synopsis: “After being let go from his job on an ostrich farm a man leaves his small village to find work in the big city. As a motorcycle taxi driver, he soon becomes consumed with his passengers’ lives and is swept up in a world of greed. Now it is up to his family back home to help restore his caring and generous nature” (emphasis added).105 A New York Times review of the film called it Majidi’s “most religious” film released in the United States.106
On April 8, 2009, Sushil Tyagi was listed as the sole producer in the credits for The Song of Sparrows on the New York Times film page. Now his entry on the New York Times film page has been removed.107
The full credits of the film, for some reason, seem to also have been scrubbed from the internet. We obtained a copy by using the Wayback machine and made a startling discovery: the movie’s chief investors included none other than the social deputy of the State Welfare Organization (SWO) of Iran (SWO-“معاونت اجتماعی سازمان بهزیستی کشور”) as well as the Cultural and Artistic Organization of Tehran (“سازمان فرهنگی و هنری شهرداری تهران”).108
These two investors in the film might appear at first
glance to be innocuous cultural organizations—but they are not. Both are funded and controlled by the Islamist Iranian government.
The Cultural and Artistic Organization of Tehran states: “This organization was founded in 1996 and [does] its activities under the supervision of a board of trustees composed of various cultural institutions such as IRIB and Islamic propaganda organization.”109 Their home page promotes several events, like one for schoolchildren entitled “The Seal of Hostages,” attended by several top Iranian officials.110
Another event that this “cultural organization” promotes is the inherently anti-Semitic Quds Day on the last day of Ramadan. The Cultural and Artistic Organization of Tehran openly acknowledges that they organize marches and create the posters, cartoons, and caricatures for Quds Day. They write: “A new plan for the destruction of Israel will be launched, and the Quds Cultural Radio station will be located at the Radio Station. Also, the ‘I love the fight against Israel’ is distributed among the people.”111
Quds Day typically features massive crowds organized by the Iranian government chanting “death to America” and burning effigies, with full media coverage.112
The film credits for Sushil’s The Song of Sparrows read like a who’s who of prominent Iranian government institutions. They include a thank-you to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Air Force.113
Tyagi’s connection to the Iranian government came at a troublesome time for U.S.-Iranian relations. Washington had accused Iran of assisting in the killing of five American soldiers based in Iraq.114 The country’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had repeatedly threatened the United States, which he declared a “satanic power,” and warned that Israel would disappear from the face of the earth.115
Sushil Tyagi also produced another film by Majid Majidi called Najva Ashorai. Even less information is available about this film than for The Song of Sparrows.116
A now shut-down Web page describes Sushil’s production company this way: “Leveraging their relationships with studio executives, access to top creative talent, and the high-level support that they enjoy from numerous foreign governments, this Los Angeles–based production company is developing a number of major international-themed projects for feature films, television, and interactive media” (emphasis added). It is not known what foreign governments those might involve beyond Iran.117 Why the website was shut down is also unknown.
Would Sushil Tyagi’s international business ties ever influence Warren’s decision making? That is hard to know. What can be known is that his businesses could stand to benefit from her advocacy and proposed policies.
One of Elizabeth Warren’s themes about anticompetitive practices in corporate America involves her critique of the beer industry. “If you’ve bought a six-pack recently,” she wrote in 2017, “chances are you’re paying more for fewer options. That’s because just two companies control the lion’s share of America’s beer, buying up the craft brewers and independent breweries that have created a vibrant beer market and jacking up beer prices in order to stuff more money into their own pockets.” She has pushed federal regulators to go after large brewing companies. “The thing is, we already have laws that prevent companies from doing just that. It’s time to start enforcing them. Antitrust agencies can start by telling aspiring monopolies: keep your hands off of our beer!”118
Warren describes herself as a “beer lover.”119 But nowhere does she mention that Sushil Tyagi, her son-in-law, runs two beer-related businessses. The first is an enterprise in India: Kali Gori Breweries in Uttarakhand province.120 The brewery name matches several business registrations in March 2011 under the name Kali Gori Breweries, both with Sushil’s name on them.121 Tyagi had been seeking to open the business since at least 2009. In fact, he authorized a power of attorney, describing the prospective business, to an Indian attorney (possibly his brother). What makes that interesting is that the power of attorney was notarized in Los Angeles, and witnessed by Elizabeth Warren and husband Bruce Mann.122 In December 2010, Tyagi registered another beer-related business, this time stateside in Delaware, but operated out of his California home.123 Called Craftbev International Amalgamated, it appears to have no other employees or executives. Its only public footprint was its purchase of the legacy Celis beer brands in June 2012.124 In November 2013, Craftbev sold for an undisclosed amount the domestic production rights for Celis to Total Beverage Solutions, a firm run by a former Guinness executive. Craftbev retained the international distribution rights until February 2017, when the Celis family repurchased all trademark rights. By Tyagi’s own statements at the time, he remains involved in the brands’ international marketing.125
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Warren has written over the years about her concerns that regulatory agencies would be “captured” by outside interests, with regulators no longer focused on the proper regulation but instead doing the bidding of those outside interests.126
Cleary Gottlieb was at the center of the effort to fight against the creation of Warren’s new bureau. Cleary Gottlieb served as the lobbyist for a host of financial firms looking to weaken Dodd-Frank. This includes Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse Group, Nomura Holdings, BNP Paribus, Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment, Deutsche Bank AG, and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.127 Cleary Gottlieb was working behind the scenes to see that the new financial reform bill worked for the interests of their clients. It is important to note that Elizabeth Warren called out several institutions and individuals for trying to undermine the financial reforms: she took Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Mary Jo White to task, for example, calling her work “extremely disappointing.”128 Warren apparently held her fire and never publicly attacked or condemned Cleary Gottlieb, who funded her work at Harvard, or their clients.129
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Ever since Warren had stepped onto the national stage in the Obama administration, powerful Democrats had been encouraging her to run for office. Senator Chuck Schumer and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were early enthusiasts.130 An organization called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee set up a fund-raising effort to draft her, so when she announced her Senate campaign in 2011, she had plenty of friends and allies.131 One of the most important was daughter Amelia, who had built up relationships within the progressive movement. In the early stages of the Democratic primary in Massachusetts, it was a crowded field. Several other candidates announced early for the run against Republican senator Scott Brown. Meanwhile, the organization connected to Amelia quietly went about boosting her status inside the progressive movement. Amelia sat on the board of directors of a left-wing organization called Demos, becoming chairman in 2010. New York–based Demos had championed Elizabeth Warren to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), never disclosing that Amelia was chairing the organization.132 Demos now applauded her run for the Senate, calling her “a figure of rare integrity” and declaring, “She and this republic are better served by Warren making the Senate run.” Miles Rapoport, then president of Demos, said in July 2011, “Demos has long been a vocal supporter of Elizabeth Warren and commends her for working tirelessly to set up the CFPB all while defending it from unrelenting and unfounded attacks.” In 2010, the group even presented her with a “Transforming America” award. In their statements of praise, though, Demos never mentioned that her daughter, Amelia, was a board member and then chairman of the organization.133
Eventually the other candidates for the Democratic primary bid melted away and Warren beat Republican incumbent Scott Brown. As Warren’s political star rose, so would Amelia’s business. Beginning in 2012 and 2013, shortly after Warren took her seat in the Senate, BTG began growing rapidly, according to a Stanford University Business School history of the company. Eventually, there was an interesting overlap between the clients that hired BTG and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s legislative work.134
In 2014, Senator Elizabeth Warren pushed for more funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I
n 2015, her daughter’s BTG landed a contract with the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health for $808,000. The following year, they received another for $467,000.135
Senator Elizabeth Warren sits on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, which has passed legislation providing funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS. In 2015, the committee passed the Ready to Learn program to help fund PBS. Also in 2015, her daughter’s firm began listing PBS as a client.136
BTG’s list of clients generally overlaps with those who have matters sitting before Elizabeth Warren in the U.S. Senate, and she at times has appeared to take positions or actions that would benefit her daughter’s clients. Consider Warren’s attitude toward the medical device industry. Warren sits on the powerful Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, with oversight of the medical industry. Warren has consistently bashed other large industries for excessive profits and failure to pay their “fair share” in taxes. “The most profitable corporations should have to pay their fair share,” she says. While the medical device industry would certainly fit that definition, Warren has been very supportive of it. As a senator, she pushed for the repeal of the medical device taxes that were part of Obama’s Affordable Care Act. She also introduced something called the Medical Innovation Act, which would take fines paid by the pharmaceutical industry and steer them for the benefit of “med-tech” companies. Warren has also favored rewriting Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules for the benefit of med-tech companies and wants certain tax credits made permanent for the industry.137
Observers have taken note of her wild inconsistencies when it comes to this one industry. One Democratic Senate staffer told Time magazine, “The idea that Elizabeth Warren thinks that one industry should get a sweetheart deal from paying their fair share for providing healthcare to poor Americans is repulsive.” Observers note that several medical device manufacturers are based in Massachusetts.138 What no one mentions is the other significant tie between the medical device industry and Warren’s family. Her daughter’s firm has more than half a dozen medical device manufacturers as clients. The BTG client list includes two of the largest medical device companies—Johnson & Johnson and General Electric. It also lists as clients Emerson, Pfizer, McKesson, Hologic, and Hitachi—all of which are in the field affected by the medical device tax. The Carlyle Group, another BTG client, spent $4.15 billion to buy a medical device company (Ortho Clinical Diagnostics) in 2015.139
Profiles in Corruption Page 14