Commerce secretary says he'll sell stock holdings
WASHINGTON — Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, said he would sell all of his remain
ing stock holdings after the Office of Government Ethics faulted him for continuing to maintain investments — and enter into new ones — that he was required to divest.
The ethics office said Ross’ continued ownership of assets
that his ethics agreement required him to divest — and his decision to open short sale positions while serving as Commerce secretary — could have placed him in position to violate criminal conflict of interest laws. It also faulted him for “various omissions and inaccurate statements” in documents filed with the Office of Government Ethics.
“Your failure to divest created the potential for a serious criminal violation on your part and undermined pub
lic confidence,” David Apol, acting director of the ethics office, wrote.
In a statement Thursday evening, Ross said he had made “inadvertent errors” and would sell all of his equity holdings and place the proceeds in U.S. Treasury bills “to maintain the public trust.”
“I take my ethics obligations very seriously,” Ross said. The value of the invest- ments Ross continued to hold was significant, including stock sales worth at least $10 million.
Ross, a f inancier who built his fortune through decades of restructuring distressed businesses, has been dogged by questions about his finances since the release last year of the Paradise Papers, a cache of docu- ments from an offshore law firm obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. Those docu- ments showed Ross retained a financial stake in the ship- ping firm Navigator Hold- ings, which has a partnership with a Russian energy company owned by oligarchs with close ties to President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Three business days after Ross was contacted by The New York Times for a forthcoming article about those ties, he took out a short position valued at between $100,000 and $250,000 on Navigator’s stock — essentially a bet that the stock’s value would decrease — putting him in a position to potentially profit from negative news about the company. The company’s stock price fell roughly 4 percent before Ross closed his position, 11 days after The Times and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published an article on his ties to Navigator.
In a response in June, Ross said that the information the reporter had contacted him about was not “market-mov- ing” and that making money was not the goal of the short sale.
The office said an internal Commerce Department inves
tigation that reviewed Ross’ calendars, briefing books and
correspondence did not indicate the presence of a criminal violation. However, it added that even inadvertent errors could damage public trust and violate criminal conflict of interest law.