Richard C. Blum

Richard Charles Blum (born July 31, 1935[1]) is an American investment banker and husband of United States Senator Dianne Feinstein. He is the chairman and president of Blum Capital, an equity investment management firm that acts as general partner for various investment partnerships and provides investment advisory services. Blum also serves in various boards of directors of several companies, including CB Richard Ellis, where until May 2009 he served as the chairman of that board. He has been a regent of the University of California since 2002.[2]

Blum was born in San Francisco, California, to a Jewish family and attended San Francisco public schools.[3] He received his B.S. in business administration in 1958 and an M.B.A. in 1959 from the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley.[4]

In the 1970s, Blum supported then Mayor of San Francisco George Moscone. After Moscone's assassination, Blum supported the new mayor Dianne Feinstein; they married in 1980.[3] (Personal note: This seems a bit convenient wouldn't you say?)

Blum founded Blum Capital in 1975 and pioneered the firm's hybrid Strategic Block/Private Equity investment strategy. Mr. Blum previously served as chairman of the board of directors of CB Richard Ellis, as well as serving as director on the boards of directors of three other portfolio companies: Fairmont Raffles Holdings International Ltd., Current Media, L.L.C. and Myer Pty Ltd. in Australia. Mr. Blum co-founded Newbridge Capital in the early 1990s and is co-chairman of TPG Asia V, L.P. (the successor fund to the Newbridge franchise that has been incorporated into Texas Pacific Group).[citation needed]

Blum has served on the boards of many prominent companies, including Northwest Airlines Corporation, Glenborough Realty Trust, Inc., Korea First Bank, URS Corporation and National Education Corporation. In addition, Blum is active in numerous non-profit organizations. He is the founder and chairman of the American Himalayan Foundation and is Honorary Consul to Mongolia and Nepal. Mr. Blum also serves as a member of the advisory board of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.[citation needed]

Blum joined investment brokerage Sutro & Co. at the age of 23, becoming a partner before age 30.[3] At Sutro, Blum led a partnership that acquired Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for $8m, selling it to Mattel four years later for $40m.[3] On the back of this deal Blum started in business for himself in 1975, founding what is now Blum Capital Partners;[3] a stake in URS Corp. was one of its first investments.[3]

On April 25, 2009, Blum was honored with the Berkeley Medal by UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgenau in front of the 14th Dalai Lama. The talk was sponsored by his American Himalayan Foundation and the Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley.[5]

Blum's wife, Senator Dianne Feinstein, has received scrutiny due to her husband's government contracts and extensive business dealings with China and her past votes on trade issues with the country. Blum has denied any wrongdoing.[13] URS Corp, which Blum had a substantial stake in, bought EG&G, a leading provider of technical services and management to the U.S. military, from The Carlyle Group in 2002; EG&G subsequently won a $600m defense contract.[3]

Blum and his wife have also received significant scrutiny and criticism due to his 75% stake in contractor Tutor Perini which received hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in military contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan during the US occupation of those countries.[14][15] Critics have argued that business contracts with the US government awarded to a company controlled by Blum raise a potential conflict-of-interest issue with the voting and policy activities of his wife.[16]

In 2009, Feinstein introduced legislation to provide $25 billion in taxpayer money to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, a government agency that had recently awarded her husband's real estate firm, CB Richard Ellis, what the Washington Times called "a lucrative contract to sell foreclosed properties at compensation rates higher than the industry norms."[17]

The United States Postal Service has entered into an exclusive contract with CB Richard Ellis to sell buildings that currently house post offices.[18]

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_C._Blum

>>9053614

After watching the video Q linked in regards to Feinstein talking about private and public, we then have this little blurb from the LA Times, "At the same time, far from the spotlight, Feinstein’s husband, Richard C. Blum, has expanded his private business interests in China–to the point that his firm is now a prominent investor inside the communist nation…"

Just found something interesting regarding Newbridge Capital LTD, one of Blums businesses.

• https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/294116

>>9053691

CHINA CONCEPTS LIMITED

• https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/125164

>>9053720

This hole goes deep. Lots of side holes.

>>9053691

Feinstein’s Ties to China Extend Beyond Chinese Spy

BY TREVOR LOUDON August 6, 2018 Updated: August 16, 2018

Last week’s revelations that a Chinese spy served on the staff of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for almost 20 years, should be shocking no one.

The unidentified agent, who was in place as recently as five years ago, was Feinstein’s driver. He also served as a “gofer” in her Bay Area office and a “liaison to the Asian-American community.” He sometimes attended functions at the Chinese consulate, as a stand-in for the senator.

At the time the spy was discovered by the FBI, Feinstein was chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee. Feinstein says she forced the agent into retirement, but no other staff were informed of the circumstances behind his exit, and no charges were filed.

Feinstein had been warned two decades ago that she might be targeted by Chinese intelligence.

The senator issued a statement on March 10, 1997, that the FBI had warned her and five other senators that the Chinese government might try to “funnel illegal contributions to her campaign and other Congressional campaigns, but she said the information had not influenced her position or her vote on any issue,” according to The New York Times.

“[Feinstein] said that while ‘the information was vague and nonspecific,’ she had concluded that she should ‘be very cautious’ in dealing with Asian-American contributors,” the NY Times report stated.

Feinstein would obviously be of interest to Chinese intelligence for the classified information she might possess through her position on the intelligence committee.

• https://www.theepochtimes.com/feinsteins-ties-to-china-extend-beyond-chinese-spy_2616284.html

REPORT: Dianne Feinstein and the ‘Butchers of Beijing’

By Spyridon MitsotakisDailyWire.com

On September 24, 2015, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) proposed legislation that would rename the street across from Red China’s embassy after pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo. “This would be the street sign that the Chinese ambassador would look at each day,” Cruz said. “This would be the address that every piece of correspondence going into the embassy and coming out of the embassy would have written on it … the PRC officials will be forced to recognize the bravery of Dr. Liu and to acknowledge it dozens of times a day – day after day after day.”

To Cruz’s horror, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) took the floor to object:

I can only infer that it has political implications, because the President of China is due to arrive here tomorrow and, therefore, this would be passed today, moved out of committee without a vote in front of the Senate. I don’t think that is the way we should do business in this Senate. Maybe people don’t believe diplomacy makes a difference, but I do.

Cruz, visibly angry, came back to the Senate floor. “The presence of President Xi in this country is precisely the reason that we should stand in unanimity in support of human rights,” Cruz said, his voice escalating. “Dr. Liu is in a Chinese prison, and the senior Senator from California is standing and objecting to recognizing this Nobel laureate’s bravery, is standing and objecting because presumably it would embarrass his Communist captors. I, for one, think as Americans we should not be troubled by embarrassing Communist oppressors.”

This is nothing new for Feinstein, and those who are at the hands of Red China know it. Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in the Chinese Gulag and dedicated his life to exposing the Communists’ human rights abuses, said in a 2001 interview:

Congress gave me nice support — Sens. Helms and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. When I met Sen. Wellstone, he said, “Harry, I don’t need a brief — just tell me what you want me to do.” But they were only some of the senators. Others took a stand for communist China based on family or business interests. For example, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), her husband is a board member of COSCO [The PLA’s Chinese Overseas Shipping Corporation] and he has other investments in China. You see, this is the kind of person [Feinstein] who is never interested in my work.

• https://www.dailywire.com/news/report-dianne-feinstein-and-butchers-beijing-spyridon-mitsotakis

>>9053912

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Ties To China Go Way Deeper Than An Alleged Office Spy

–By Ben Weingarten

AUGUST 8, 2018–

“I sometimes say that in my last life maybe I was Chinese.”—Sen. Dianne Feinstein

As media, intelligence agency, and political scrutiny of foreign meddling is seemingly at its apex, a story with big national security implications involving a high-ranking senator with access to America’s most sensitive intelligence information has been hiding in plain sight.

The story involves China and the senior U.S. senator from California, and former chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Democrat Dianne Feinstein. It was buried eight paragraphs into a recent Politico exposé on foreign efforts to infiltrate Silicon Valley, as a passing example of political espionage:

Former intelligence officials…[said] Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics. (A spokesperson for Feinstein said the office doesn’t comment on personnel matters or investigations, but noted that no Feinstein staffer in California has ever had a security clearance.)

Later comes additional detail:

According to four former intelligence officials, in the 2000s, a staffer in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s San Francisco field office was reporting back to the MSS [China’s Ministry of State Security, its intelligence and security apparatus]. While this person, who was a liaison to the local Chinese community, was fired, charges were never filed against him. (One former official reasoned this was because the staffer was providing political intelligence and not classified information—making prosecution far more difficult.) The suspected informant was ‘run’ by officials based at China’s San Francisco Consulate, said another former intelligence official. The spy’s handler ‘probably got an award back in China’ for his work, noted this former official, dryly.

This anecdote provides significantly more questions than answers. For starters: Who was the spy? For how long was the spy under surveillance? What information about “local politics” was the spy passing back to China? Just how close was the spy to the senator? Did law enforcement officials sweep vehicles and other areas for listening devices? Was there an investigation into whether others in the senator’s circle may have been coordinating with Beijing?

Did the senator expose herself to potential blackmail, or the public to danger through leakage of sensitive, highly classified information? Is firing really the proper punishment for providing political intelligence to a foreign power?

The Details Right Now Are Few and Blurry

We now know only the most basic of additional details about what occurred in Feinstein’s office. Five years ago, the FBI approached the senator to apprise her that a San Francisco-based staffer was being investigated under suspicion of spying for China. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Feinstein’s hometown paper, this staffer, who had worked with Feinstein for almost 20 years, drove her around in San Francisco and “served as gofer in her San Francisco office and as a liaison to the Asian American community, even attending Chinese Consulate functions for the senator.”

• https://thefederalist.com/2018/08/08/sen-dianne-feinsteins-ties-china-go-way-deeper-alleged-office-spy/

>>9053940

Feinstein’s Chinese Spy – Facing Facts

By: Joe SchaefferAugust 12, 2018

There is so much that remains unknown about the Chinese spy who was employed on Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s personal staff for 20 years. As details continue to emerge, one thing is certain: this sordid tale has serious implications for U.S. national security and congressional ethics.

The story first broke when Politico Magazine ran an article on spies in Silicon Valley by Zach Dorfman in which the reporter revealed the startling news that “[f]ormer intelligence officials told me that Chinese intelligence once recruited a staff member at a California office of U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, and the source reported back to China about local politics.”

The San Francisco Chronicle followed that up by reporting that Feinstein’s “driver was being investigated for possible Chinese spying.”

“Besides driving her around when she was in California, the staffer also served as a gofer in her San Francisco office and as a liaison to the Asian American community, even attending Chinese Consulate functions for the senator,” the Chronicle reported.

Plum Target

Ben Weingarten, writing at The Federalist, reports “[a]n unnamed source added that a Chinese MSS [Ministry of State Security] official first approached the staffer during a visit to Asia several years prior. Given his proximity to Feinstein, we have no idea what information he could have gleaned in her employ.”

Weingarten also notes that “Feinstein’s account [of immediately removing the employee as soon as she was notified by the FBI] conflicts with what has been reported regarding the recruitment and activities of the Chinese spy. She conveniently omits that her office employed this individual for almost 20 years in a close capacity, while he represented the senator in interactions with Chinese officials.”

Paul Sperry, in the New York Post, writes that Feinstein was an “easy mark” for Chinese espionage agents:

In June 1996 – after the staffer [spy] had begun working for Feinstein – the FBI detected that the Chinese government was attempting to seek favor with the senator, who at the time sat on the East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees US-China relations. Investigators warned her in a classified briefing that Beijing might try to influence her through illegal campaign contributions laundered through front corporations and other cutouts.

Despite this warning, Sperry notes that Feinstein accepted campaign contributions from “Chinese bagman” John Huang.

• https://www.libertynation.com/feinsteins-chinese-spy-facing-facts/

>>9053691

Newbridge Capital

In 1994, TPG, Blum Capital and ACON Investments created Newbridge Capital, a joint-venture to invest in emerging markets, particularly Asia and later Latin America. At its peak, Newbridge managed over $3.2 billion. Newbridge was headquartered alongside TPG in Fort Worth and San Francisco with investment offices across the Asia-Pacific region in Hong Kong, Melbourne, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, and Tokyo. In 1995, Newbridge also ventured into Latin America, raising a $300 million fund and then a follow up $150 million fund in 1996. After its debut funds in the mid-1990s, Newbridge did not continue to focus on Latin America.

Since its founding, Newbridge developed a specialization in five broad industry groups: financial services, technology and telecom, healthcare, consumer, and industrials. Newbridge was involved in a number of the largest and most notable private equity transactions in Asia including:

Shenzhen Development Bank - the first control purchase of a Chinese national bank by a foreign entity since 1949

Korea First Bank - the first foreign acquisition of a South Korean bank

Hanaro Telecom - a major Asian proxy contest, that was the largest at that time

Matrix Laboratories - the largest private equity transaction in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, to that point

In the early 2000s, TPG assumed full ownership and control over the Newbridge joint venture, renaming the firm TPG Newbridge. At the beginning of 2007, when the firm officially changed its name from Texas Pacific Group to TPG Capital, TPG Newbridge's Asian funds were also rebranded as the TPG Asia Funds.

TPG remained active in Asia in 2008. On August 4, TPG, along with Global Infrastructure Partners, offered to buy Asciano Limited for AUD 2.9 billion in an unsuccessful attempt to complete an unsolicited takeover. On October 31, 2008, TPG completed the purchase of a 35% interest in P.T. Bumi Resources, from its previous owner Bakrie & Brothers, Indonesia, for $1.3 billion.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TPG_Capital#Newbridge_Capital

>>9054200

Interesting thing from the LA Times post from 1997,

In 1992, when Feinstein entered the Senate, Blum’s interests in China amounted to one project worth less than $500,000, according to her financial disclosure reports. But since then, his financial activities in the country have increased.

In the last year, a Blum investment firm paid $23 million for a stake in a Chinese government-owned steel enterprise and acquired sizable interests in the leading producers of soybean milk and candy in China. Blum’s firm, Newbridge Capital Ltd., received an important boost from a $10-million investment by the International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank. Experts said that IFC backing typically confers legitimacy and can help attract other investors.

“It seems to be going quite well,” Rashad Kaldanywho in 1994 managed the IFC’s capital markets investments in Asiasaid of the project. He added: “There also was some comfort in that Mr. Blum had some contacts with the Chinese.”

• https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-03-28-mn-43046-story.html

So Blums interests in China amounted to around $500k, but then later, "…a Blum investment firm paid $23 million for a stake in a Chinese government-owned steel enterprise and acquired sizable interests in the leading producers of soybean milk and candy in China."

Then it goes on to say, "Newbridge Capital Ltd., received an important boost from a $10-million investment by the International Finance Corp., an arm of the World Bank. Experts said that IFC backing typically confers legitimacy and can help attract other investors.

“It seems to be going quite well,” Rashad Kaldanywho in 1994 managed the IFC’s capital markets investments in Asiasaid of the project. He added: “There also was some comfort in that Mr. Blum had some contacts with the Chinese.”

So, illicit shady shit going on, so almost certainly there is some money laundering going on. Follow the money.