I realize that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s background is in medicine, but there have been a series of odd investment decisions he’s made that raise a few questions about his judgment.
We first learned in December, for example, that Frist’s campaign committee suffered big losses (more than $524,000) in the stock market and ultimately came up short of money needed to cover a bank loan that was due in August. Frist’s filings showed he had paid a little more than $10,000 on a $360,000 loan from U.S. Bank. Lucky guy.
This looked even worse when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a detailed (and rather incriminating) expose on alleged fiscal mismanagement and bizarre investment strategies on Frist’s part over the last several years.
And then, there’s this.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a potential presidential candidate in 2008, sold all his stock in his family’s hospital corporation about two weeks before it issued a disappointing earnings report and the price fell nearly 15 percent.
Frist held an undisclosed amount of stock in Hospital Corporation of America, based in Nashville, the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain. On June 13, he instructed the trustee managing the assets to sell his HCA shares and those of his wife and children, said Amy Call, a spokeswoman for Frist.
There’s some plausible deniability — a trustee, not Frist, decided exactly when to sell the shares — but Frist made the call and his timing sure was extraordinary. He chose to sell right around the time HCA shares spiked, only to see the value fall after the company announced its quarterly earnings would not meet analysts’ expectations.
The real question, then, is what prompted Frist’s decision. So far, his office hasn’t come up with a good answer.
“To avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, Senator Frist went beyond what ethics requires and sold the stock,” Call said.
Asked why he had not done so before, she said, “I don’t know that he’s been worried about it in the past.”
OK, but what made him worry about it now? Frist was elected to the Senate about 11 years ago. All of a sudden, a year before he retires from the chamber, he wants to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest? And the timing of this decision just so happens to play heavily to his family’s financial interests?
Sounds like Frist still has some explaining to do.