Worthen Bank
Little Rock bank owned jointly in the 1980s by Jackson Stephens and the Riady family of Indonesia, which employed James Riady and John Huang and financed Bill Clinton's 1992 primary campaign.
Worthen Banking Corporation was a bank holding company in Little Rock. The family of Jackson Stephens owned 38 percent of it in January 1993. It was sold to Boatmen's Bancshares in 1994.1
The Riadys
Mochtar Riady, founder of the Lippo Group of Indonesia, met Jackson and Witt Stephens in 1976, and the families formed Stephens Finance Ltd. in Hong Kong in 1978. Both invested in Worthen in 1983. Riady's son James Riady, who had been an intern at Stephens Inc., moved to Little Rock to run the bank's international division. John Huang, born in Fujian and raised in Taiwan, joined in February 1985 as vice president for the Far East, a title he held together with a vice presidency of the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, reporting to Riady in both. A former partner of the Rose Law Firm, C. Joseph Giroir, organized the Arkansas International Development Corporation on Lippo money. A Riady memorandum obtained by House investigators dated the family's relationship with Bill Clinton to a five-minute car ride with the governor.23
In 1985 the bank lost 52 million dollars of state funds that it had placed in repurchase agreements with the New Jersey securities dealer Bevill, Bresler and Schulman, which failed amid fraud charges. Stephens covered the loss, by one account with a check written "in the middle of the night," and led a rights offering to restore the bank's capital. About 1987 the Riadys exchanged their Worthen shares for the Stephens interest in the Hong Kong Chinese Bank. James Riady and Huang went to California to run LippoBank. At the end of 1991 Lippo was the expected purchaser of the Hong Kong subsidiary of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, until investigators there found 145 million dollars in unrecorded claims. The Saudi investor Abdullah Taha Bakhsh, the third largest stockholder of Harken Energy, was reported in 1991 to own 10 percent of Worthen.245
The 1992 Campaign
Under its chairman, Curt Bradbury, who as a Stephens officer had attended the 1977 meeting in Little Rock between Stephens, Bert Lance, and a representative of the Bank of Credit and Commerce, Worthen gave the Clinton presidential campaign a line of credit of 3.5 million dollars, secured on federal matching funds. About three million was drawn. By another account the line was opened in early January 1992, before the crises of the primary season, and the first million was drawn on March 4. The campaign's finance officer, David Watkins, negotiated it. The campaign kept as much as 55 million dollars in federal funds on deposit at the bank. Bradbury and Mack McLarty, chairman of Arkla, the gas company the Stephens family had controlled, organized Little Rock dinners that raised two million. James Riady and his wife gave 450,000 dollars to the 1992 effort, and on August 12, 1992, the Riady company Hip Hing Holdings gave 50,000 dollars to the Democratic Victory Fund and was reimbursed from Jakarta. Stephens Inc. had given 100,000 dollars to a dinner for President George H.W. Bush in May 1991.1246
Sources
- "Meet The Family That Bankrolled Clinton," The Seattle Times, January 31, 1993. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19930131&slug=1682819 ↩
- House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Investigation of Political Fundraising Improprieties and Possible Violations of Law, interim report, H. Rept. 105-829, 1998, vol. 2. ↩
- Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Investigation of Illegal or Improper Activities in Connection with 1996 Federal Election Campaigns, S. Rept. 105-167, 1998, sections on John Huang. ↩
- Truell, Peter, and Larry Gurwin. False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire. Houghton Mifflin, 1992, pp. 41 and 428. ↩
- Petzinger, Thomas, Peter Truell, and Jill Abramson. "How Oil Firm Linked to a Son of Bush Won Big Drilling Pact," The Wall Street Journal, December 6, 1991. ↩
- Morris, Roger. Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America. Henry Holt, 1996. ↩
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