Is Macquarie Robbing the Public Treasury?

As reported on this blog, Macquarie recently purchased one of it’s most outspoken toll and privatization critics in Texas, a newspaper group, in January.

Today, Alice S. McGuffie reports that one of Macquarie’s key players, who has been pushing the privatization of our infrastructure (a corporate subsidy scheme) for Macquarie profit is on the verge of being appointed as a key player on the other side of the negotiating table - as a U.S. Department of Transportation representative. Macquarie, who has partnered with Cintra in the past, can profit off TTC deals worth hundreds of Billions of dollars in Texas alone - in the coming decades.

MacQuarie's D.J. Gribbin moves closer to assuming DOT general counsel role

By Alice S. McGuffie, Waller Tx

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Nomination hearing of David J. Gribbin, IV on Thursday, March 29, 2007 for the position of General Counsel of the Department of Transportation has totally gone without notice by any news organizations. This quiet event, though not particularly individually significant, is one more step in the United States' giant leap toward privatizing our national infrastructure.

Gribbin was nominated by President George W. Bush in January of this year and his credentials demonstrate rapid job bounces between the public and private sectors.

D.J. Gribbin has served a little more than a year as a Division Director of Macquarie Holdings, Inc. While in this role he testified at the U.S. HOUSE TRANSPORTATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE COMMITTEE “UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY PUBLIC-PRIVATE HIGHWAY TRANSACTIONS: THE FUTURE OF INFRASTRUCTURE FINANCE” MAY 24, 2006 and encouraged Congress to "liberate" the "dead capital" of the U.S. Highway Infrastructure by facilitating more public private partnerships. Macquarie Holdings is the U.S. based "child" of Australia's Macquarie Bank.

In an October 2005 article, The Sydney Morning Herald Newspaper called Macquarie Bank the Millionaire's factory, an insatiable innovator, mesmerising the market with financial origami and generating apparently endless streams of money, and likened Macquarie Bank to "the greatest corporate catastrophe in history … Enron, the energy monster that invented new markets in everything from electricity to bandwidth to weather futures and then imploded."

Read the rest of the article HERE.