Cornyn's Corporate Sponsors
Industry Breakdowns: Finance
| [ Cornyn's Corporate Sponsors Industry Breakdowns: Finance |
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The finance industry provided 11 percent of Cornyn’s big-check money. Securities firms provided 54 percent of this cash, led by Everen Securities ($84,570). Banks provided almost one-third of this Finance money, led by Houston’s First City Bancorp ($85,500). Accounting firms provided 10 percent of this sector’s money, led by H.D. Vest Financial Services ($80,000). Non-Bank Finance companies, dominated by predatory lenders, supplied the remaining 6 percent of this money, led by Rep. Gary Elkins’ Personal Rental Corp. ($28,000). Cornyn’s predecessor, Dan Morales, accused Elkins’ company of breaking state usury laws in 1991. Personal Rental offered cash to poor consumers who agreed to lease back their own appliances from the company at effective interest rates exceeding 780 percent. A jury acquitted Elkins, who won a House seat a year later.7
Interest Contributions Percent Securities Banks Accounting Non-Bank Finance
| Educational Investments
Several top Cornyn donors had a role in the scandal in which politically connected financiers profited from the University of Texas System’s (UT’s) $14 billion endowment. After corporate raider Tom Hicks failed to convince UT to invest in his 1990 take over of a dental company, he contributed $17,500 to then-Governor Ann Richards. Richards appointed Hicks to the UT Board of Regents and Hicks’ lobbyists also helped pass a 1995 bill that created the quasi-public UT Investment Management Co. (UTIMCO). Since 1996, a nine-member UTIMCO board—stacked with big political donors who received gubernatorial appointments as UT or A&M regents—has been hiring outside firms to invest portions of UT’s endowment. With Hicks as its first chair, UTIMCO secretly awarded many of these lucrative contracts to firms with close ties to Hicks and then-Governor George W. Bush.1 “Under the protection of two Texas attorney general rulings upholding UTIMCO’s authority to act in secrecy,” the Houston Chronicle reported, UTIMCO “placed $457 million … into funds run by associates of UTIMCO Chairman Tom Hicks or with five funds run by major Republican political donors.” 2 Following the footsteps of predecessor Dan Morales, Cornyn repeatedly
denied public requests for information on UTIMCO’s dealings, thereby shielding
UTIMCO board members (who gave him $194,000) and the recipients of these
lucrative contracts. Cornyn received $115,000 from Tom Hicks’ family.3
Another founding UTIMCO board member, lobbyist Tom Loeffler, gave Cornyn
$25,000. Hicks and Loeffler (who both resigned from UTIMCO after the Chronicle’s
expose), voted to award a big UTIMCO contract to Maverick Capital, whose
founders—Sam and Charles Wyly—gave Cornyn $45,000. UTIMCO also invested
$20 million with a Bass Brothers Enterprises fund. Cornyn received $172,352
from Bass family interests.
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