Steven Rattner feels he is being unfairly persecuted. After settling with the SEC over his participation in a kickback scheme that directed $150 million from a state pension fund to his company, Quadrangle, and facilitated the distribution of a truly terrible movie, for $6 million, he believes he should be left in peace. Instead, he is being targeted by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who is making him feel like the Job of the securities industry. “I have been subjected to every kind of threat of prosecution and punishment known to man practically,” Rattner complained to his longtime friend Charlie Rose last night. What has Cuomo threatened him with? Waterboarding, starvation, extreme temperatures, the Judas chair?
No, just lawsuits that will take away his money and connections. “He has basically threatened me all along the way that if I don’t do what he wants me to do he will prosecute me to the ends of the earth, basically,” he went on. Rattner doesn’t know why the attorney general is doing this to him, if he has some kind of “emotional” problem or something, but it feels personal. For instance, already earlier this year, he forced Rattner’s former partners to call his conduct “wrong, inappropriate, and unethical” in settling the lawsuit he filed against them.
“That was one of the most hurtful things that’s ever happened to me,” Mr. Rattner said. “I worked with these people for most of my career — in one case 20 years, in one case 15 years, in another case 10 years — and I could not believe that they would throw me overboard to try to save the firm and themselves. I was really stunned by it.”
“How painful can that be?” Mr. Rose asked.
Now it’s looking like it could be just him and Charlie Rose. That is, if he’s able to keep the donations to Charlie’s show coming.
Charlie Rose [Official Site]
Rattner, on Charlie Rose, Rails Against Cuomo [DealBook/NYT]
