Koch taint on McGuire gets worse
Mayoral candidate Ray McGuire’s ties to the Koch brothers aren’t limited to serving as banker of the conservative donors’ company years ago.
Charles Phillips, a top-ranking member of McGuire’s campaign, also presided over a software firm that worked with Koch Industries more recently. Before joining McGuire’s campaign, Phillips served as CEO of Infor, a company acquired by Koch Industries last year and did business with them since 2017.
Phillips’ connection to the company owned by industrialist Charles Koch raises more questions about the Democratic candidate’s ties to the big-fish right wing donors after the Daily News revealed last week that McGuire served as the company’s banker while working as an executive at Citi.
Charles Koch’s brother and a co-owner of the company, David, died in 2019.
“The Kochs helped fund Trumpism as we know it, and we see it exploding all over the country now,” said Jonathan Westin, executive director of New York Communities for Change, an advocacy group for the poor. “The idea that we would have people connected to the Koch brothers running our city is really unfathomable.” McGuire’s campaign spokeswoman Lupe Todd-Medina pushed back hard on the Koch-related criticisms, noting that Phillips jumped ship from Infor the same day Koch Industries assumed control.
“First off, Charles isn’t a candidate for mayor. Second, Charles left Infor the day the Koch Industries acquired control. The acquisition was an independent decision by the controlling shareholder which was their legal right,” she said.
“The grandson of a sharecropper, Charles Phillips is a former U.S. Marine, chairman of the Apollo Theater, was a member of President Obama’s economic recovery board and a co-founder of the Black Economic Alliance, so he won’t be sullied by mud thrown by political insiders.”
Phillips, who now serves as McGuire’s campaign co-chairman, served as Infor’s CEO and board chairman from December 2010 until September 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Six months before he left Infor, Koch Industries acquired the company, which describes itself as “a key component of Koch’s technological transformation.”
But Infor’s connections to the Kochs preceded the takeover for years.
“In addition to being an Infor investor since 2017, Koch has been a key customer, implementing Infor solutions across its businesses in areas like enterprise resource planning, human resources, supply chain, asset management and finance,” the company’s website notes.
McGuire raised hackles among fellow Democrats when The News revealed his role in Koch Industries’ takeover of the Georgia Pacific paper company, a deal that paved the way for mass layoffs and a significant reduction in Georgia Pacific’s union workforce.
The brothers are known for their enormous donations to conservative causes. Over the years, they’ve bankrolled the Americans for Prosperity political action committee, which fought measures to address global warming, promoted tax cuts for the rich and successfully pushed for the passage of anti-union laws around the country.