Ray Hunt

Ray Lee Hunt (born April 1943) is the chairman of Hunt Oil Company and Hunt Consolidated of Dallas. He is the son of H.L. Hunt and Ruth Ray, was born in New York while his father's first wife was living, and was adopted by his father after his parents married in 1957. His father's will gave all of his Hunt Oil stock to Ruth Hunt and made Ray sole executor. He was finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in 2000, a director of Halliburton from 1998, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas from 2002 to 2006, and a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009.¹²³

The Estate

Hunt joined Hunt Oil as a summer field hand in 1958 and graduated from Southern Methodist University. When his father died on November 29, 1974, the family's holdings ran through some 200 trusts and companies. In 1975 he negotiated a division with the sons of the first family: Bunker, Herbert, and Lamar Hunt took Hunt Energy, Placid Oil, and Penrod Drilling, and he kept Hunt Oil. Frania Tye Lee, whom his father had married bigamously in 1925, sued the estate that November. In May 1977, after Dallas newspapers reported that a letter signed by Lee Harvey Oswald had been addressed to a "Mr. Hunt," he wrote to FBI Director Clarence Kelley to protest, and Kelley referred him to the Freedom of Information Act. The company's spokesman in that episode, James C. Oberwetter, had been press secretary to Congressman George H.W. Bush.¹⁴⁵

Reunion

In 1972 Hunt began buying floodplain land beside Dallas's Union Station at 2.92 dollars a square foot, formed Woodbine Development, and hired John Scovell, a 26-year-old accountant and former Texas Tech quarterback, to run it. The Hyatt Regency Dallas and Reunion Tower opened on the site on April 15, 1978. He financed the launch of D Magazine.¹⁶

Yemen

Hunt Oil found the Alif field near Marib in 1984, the first oil discovered in North Yemen. On April 12, 1986, Vice President George H.W. Bush, on a tour of Arab capitals, flew to Marib in a C-130 and dedicated the field's refinery with President Ali Abdullah Saleh. "A happy day for the Yemen Arab Republic and for the entire industrial world," Bush said. Yemen took back the block on November 15, 2005, and Hunt Oil and ExxonMobil filed for arbitration in Paris. Hunt remained a partner with Total in Yemen LNG, which began operating in 2009.⁷⁸

Halliburton and the Intelligence Board

Hunt joined the Halliburton board in 1998, when Dick Cheney was chief executive, and went at once onto its compensation committee, which that year gave Cheney a bonus of 1.1 million dollars and restricted stock worth 1.5 million on a salary of 1.18 million. He joined the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas the same year. He was a Pioneer fundraiser for George W. Bush, who made him finance chairman of the Republican National Committee in May 2000. His son Hunter L. Hunt took leave from the company to work on the campaign's energy policy group.²⁹

On October 5, 2001, the White House announced Hunt's appointment to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board under General Brent Scowcroft. The other members included Jim Barksdale, Robert Addison Day, Stephen Friedman, Alfred Lerner, Rita Hauser, Admiral David Jeremiah, Arnold Kanter, James C. Langdon Jr., Pete Wilson, and Philip Zelikow. Scowcroft was removed after criticizing the Iraq war. On October 27, 2005, the White House reappointed Hunt for a term beginning December 20 under Friedman, with Donald Evans, Arthur B. Culvahouse, William O. DeWitt Jr., and Lee Hamilton. In the same years two Hunt Oil executives became ambassadors. Jeanne L. Phillips, a senior vice president and a fundraiser for the Bush campaign and inaugural, was ambassador to the OECD from August 2001 to June 2003 and returned to the company. Oberwetter was sworn in as ambassador to Saudi Arabia on January 8, 2004.²³¹⁰

Kurdistan

On September 8, 2007, Hunt Oil and the Kurdistan Regional Government announced a production-sharing contract for a block in the Dohuk area, signed under a regional oil law that the Kurdish parliament had passed a month earlier and that the government in Baghdad did not recognize. The Bush administration's policy was that no contracts should be signed before a national oil law. Three days before the signing, Hunt Oil's regional manager, David McDonald, told the head of the State Department's reconstruction team in Erbil that the company was interested in the Shekhan and Akra districts of northern Nineveh, territory disputed between Erbil and Baghdad. "This is a significant opportunity that outweighs the legal ambiguity," he said, and of the geology: "It's like shooting fish in a barrel." The embassy's cable reporting the contract went to Washington on September 12. Ray Hunt said he was pleased to be "actively participating in the establishment of the petroleum industry in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq." President Bush said: "I know nothing about the deal."¹¹¹²

On July 2, 2008, Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, released company and government documents and wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that "contrary to the denials of Administration officials, advisors to the President and officials in the State and Commerce Departments knew about Hunt Oil's interest in the Kurdish region months before the contract was executed." Hunt Oil officials had met the State Department team in Erbil on June 12, 2007. Hunt had written to the intelligence board on July 12 and August 30, 2007, describing his contacts with the Kurds. An internal Hunt Oil message quoted in the letter read: "This is really good for us ... I find it a huge compliment that he is tipping us off about this ... This is a lucky break."¹²

Sharyland

Hunter Hunt founded Sharyland Utilities in 1999, the first new regulated electric utility in the United States in three decades. Under the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone program that the Texas Legislature created in 2005, Sharyland was awarded about 300 miles of transmission lines in the Panhandle. In 2010 the family placed the lines in a real estate investment trust, InfraREIT, which leased them back to the utility. In 2016 Sharyland's average residential delivery charge was 90.39 dollars a month against 38.59 dollars at Oncor. Oncor and Sempra Energy bought the assets in 2019 in transactions worth about 1.3 billion dollars.¹³