Investor ‘Bucky’ Bush, aged 79

William HT “Bucky” Bush, a wealthy investor and the brother and uncle of presidents, has died at his home in Florida. He was 79.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush confirmed his uncle’s death but did not describe the cause.

“Bucky” Bush, the brother of President George HW Bush, uncle of President George W Bush and youngest son of Senator Prescott S Bush of Connecticut, was also active in Republican politics.

He chaired his nephew’s presidential reelection campaign in Missouri. At the time, he recounted that he used to babysit the future 43rd president of the US.

Mr Bush was co-founder and chairman of Bush O’donnell Investment Advisors in St Louis.

Mr Bush was in the spotlight in 2007, when he and other directors of a defence contractor reaped a total of $6 million from what federal regulators called an illegal scheme by two executives to manipulate the timing of stock option grants.

Mr Bush was a non-executive director of St Louis-based Engineered Support Systems, whose profits were bolstered because of the Iraq War.

He was not accused of any personal wrongdoing in a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, but the agency said he made about $450,000 selling some of his stock in 2005.

William Henry Trotter Bush was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, on July 14 1938.

He was the youngest of five children of Prescott Bush, a Wall Street investment banker who served as a Republican senator from Connecticut from 1952 to 1963, and Dorothy Walker.

After graduating in 1956 from the private Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn, he received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University in 1960. He helped start Bush O’donnell in 1986.

Patricia Redfearn, whom he married in 1959, died in 2015. They had two children.

Mr Bush was a wealthy investor.