October 05, 2007

Fabian Nunez' questionable expenditures (luxury foreign hotels, goods)

California Assembly speaker and Hillary Clinton campaign co-chair Fabian Nunez must be on the outs with the Politburo, because the Los Angeles Times offers "Nunez travels the world like a high-roller" (link):

[...his spending] includes $47,412 on United, Lufthansa and Air France airlines this year; $8,745 at the exclusive Hotel Arts in Barcelona, Spain; $5,149 for a "meeting" at Cave L'Avant Garde, a wine seller in the Bordeaux region of France; a total of $2,562 for two "office expenses" at Vuitton, two years apart; and $1,795 for a "meeting" at Le Grand Colbert, a venerable Parisian restaurant.

...Other expenses are closer to home: a $1,715 meeting at Asia de Cuba restaurant in West Hollywood; a $317 purchase at upscale Pavilion Salon Shoes in Sacramento; a $2,428 meeting at 58 Degrees and Holding, a Sacramento wine bar and bistro; and $800 spent at Dollar Rent a Car in Kihei, Hawaii.

...Given a list of 99 entries culled from his campaign finance filings, however, Nunez's staff refused to show how the expenditures were related to California government or politics...

..."There's not too big a difference," [Nunez] said, "between how I live and how most middle-class people live."

...He received a total of $1.9 million in 2005 and 2006 from unions, corporations and others with a perennial stake in legislative business. They include $17,300 from AT&T and Verizon, phone companies that pushed Nunez legislation allowing them to compete against cable television companies, and $2,500 from a group of pharmaceutical companies affected by a Nunez bill to create a prescription drug discount program.

The State Building and Construction Trades Council of California donated $5,000 in February 2006, one day before a bill it sponsored was introduced in the Assembly.

The state Democratic Party, which unlike officeholders can raise unlimited sums, transferred $4 million to Nunez's campaign account last November.

...Similarly, the tax-exempt William C. Velasquez Institute, a policy think tank focused on Latino issues, paid $6,169 toward Nunez's 2005 trip to France and Sweden to study universal preschool. The institute also helped finance Nunez's trip to France in April to study high-speed rail, according to institute President Antonio Gonzalez...

Posted to California at October 5, 2007 11:15 AM