NP? No war profits in this economy, no sir!

[Doug Millison]

[...] Carlyle has done exceedingly well for the 435 pension funds, banks
and investment funds--40 percent from overseas--that have entrusted their
money to one of the world's largest private equity funds. Under the
leadership of Carlucci, a former CIA deputy director who was Defense
Secretary in the Reagan Administration, Carlyle has become the nation's
eleventh-largest defense contractor, a major arms exporter to Saudi Arabia
and Turkey, one of the biggest foreign investors in South Korea and Taiwan,
and a key player in global telecommunications, wireless, real estate and
healthcare markets. Since 1987 it has invested $6.4 billion in 233
transactions, with a rate of return of 36 percent on its completed
investments. Carlyle currently has $12.5 billion invested. [...] Bush is
Carlyle's senior adviser on Asia and makes his money by giving speeches at
Carlyle's investment conferences. Baker, who was Bush's Secretary of State,
is Carlyle's senior counselor and a member of the firm's Asia, Europe and
Japan advisory boards. John Major, the former British prime minister, was
named chairman of Carlyle Europe last year. Carlyle's advisory boards are
peppered with corporate executives from Boeing, BMW, Toshiba and other big
multinationals, and men of influence like former Bundesbank president Karl
Otto Pohl, former Thai prime minister Anand Panyarachun and former US
ambassador to Japan (and former Speaker of the House) Thomas Foley.
Carlyle's new asset management group is run by Afsaneh Beschloss, the
former treasurer and chief investment officer of the World Bank.  By hiring
enough former officials to fill a permanent shadow cabinet, Carlyle has
brought political influence to a new level and created a
twenty-first-century version of capitalism that blurs any line between
politics and business. [...] Then came September 11 and its aftermath. With
the Crusader contract in hand and President Bush's war in Afghanistan well
under way, Carlyle decided the time was ripe to sell some of its United
Defense holdings on the stock market. The initial public offering on
December 14 raised $237 million for Carlyle. In January United Defense,
whose board of directors includes Carlucci and John Shalikashvili, former
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said its fourth-quarter profits had
risen 62 percent, due in large part to sales of the Crusader, which
received $472 million in the Pentagon's latest budget. [...]


continues at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020401&s=shorrock