1)
On at least two occasions
when Noe’s case has come before the Parole Board, she’s implied that Noe has
accounts in the Cayman Islands. There is no truth at all to this. The Cayman
Islands allegation came before the trial and was anonymous and vague. It was investigated
and found to have no substance. Federal prosecutors were involved and brought
no charges. Mrs. Bates didn’t mention it at trial. She has
talked repeatedly about it, but only to the media.
With as
much credibility, I could make the allegation that Mrs. Bates and her staff
took OBWC money and have kept it in Cayman Islands accounts. After all, they
had access to all of Noe’s financials. I would, of course, have no evidence at
all to support the allegation. Just as she has nothing to back up her implied
claim. Nothing. At all.
I’m not
an expert, but I wonder if there isn’t an ethical issue with someone with the
public responsibility of a prosecutor making implied allegations like this.
Given her position, the public will very likely assume Mrs. Bate’s implications
are true.
2) Bates uses “missing money” to imply there are funds that are
unaccounted for. In fact, a large number of professionals, working for over a
year, examined all of the transactions in an array of Noe’s accounts and made
not one single allegation of money missing in the sense of unaccounted for
funds. They had access to all of Noe’s records from before the OBWC investment
and traced even small expenditures from the OBWC through the Coin Funds and
into Noe’s personal accounts. Nothing was alleged to be missing.
When
someone mentions “missing money” and “Cayman Islands” in the same short
interview, and then throws in a “where’s the money line,” the intended audience,
the public itself, is highly likely to conclude
that Noe has money hidden somewhere, most probably the Cayman Islands.
It’s
instructive that Bates doesn’t make these allegations in formal filings – where
they could be challenged – but instead directs them only to the media whose
reports she knows the Parole Board will see (on second thought, while she
didn’t allege anything like this in court, I don’t know what Bates has said to
the Parole Board – the Board keeps that confidential and she chooses not to
release it).
3) The $13 million figure repeatedly used by Mrs. Bates is simply
wrong – and apparently deliberately so. It’s not the correct figure from the
trial, and doesn’t fully account for funds recovered from Noe’s assets. This is
a complicated topic (covered primarily in the book) but no analysis conforms
to Mrs. Bates’ claims.
As I’ve
mentioned before and described in detail, Noe did have a debt to the state and
that has been repaid only in part. What the debt was and how much has been
covered by Noe’s assets is, unfortunately, difficult to assess (see the discussion
of records, below). But here, again, are thoughts on the shortfall.
·
The accounting presented at
trial was quite sloppy and there’s no reason to assume it improved afterward.
There’s good reason to believe that assets that should have been attributed to
Noe’s account were instead ascribed to that of the state.
·
Noe did live well, but not
exceptionally so. The state picked out for presentation at trial expenditures
they thought would sway the jury by their profligacy. In fact, they were
mundane things like landscaping expenditures. There were no exotic cars or exotic
animal clothing purchases or the like (I’m not sure, but I think I remember
from the bills that Noe drove a GMC SUV – no Ferraris or even Porsches anywhere
in the records). In sum, there doesn’t seem to be evidence of much loss of
assets to Noe’s lifestyle (the Blade will as always insert “lavish” in
front of lifestyle in the case of Noe, but it simply doesn’t fit).
·
Real estate? The state
seized two houses and sold them. Very nice houses but not mansions that stood
out in their neighborhoods. And the Florida house owned by his wife? As I’ve
discussed in previous posts, there couldn’t have been much Noe money there. It
was mortgaged. A lot. The Blade seems to think people pay cash in full for
their houses, but it isn’t so.
·
So, what accounts for the
shortfall? Legal bills could add up to maybe a million but likely not much
more. Beyond that, it’s simple. Noe was an investor in coins and collectibles
and related instruments like the stock offerings of businesses in the field of
coins and collectibles. He had a lot of investments
and the state seized everything and sold it. By the accounts of professionals I
spoke to, Noe’s holdings were disposed of quickly and without the patience
needed to extract maximum value. When you operate like that, you can lose many
millions. This is the “missing” money – the difference between the value of accounts
strategically disposed of and those dumped in a political fire sale.
Mrs. Bates’ repeated attempts to mislead about Coingate draw
attention to other key facts involving actions that involve the entire
“investigative team” as well her own prosecutorial group:
1) The Auditor of State (Betty Montgomery at the time) charged an
outside auditing firm with examining the OBWC Coin Fund investment as a whole,
but then secretly changed that to an investigation focused exclusively on Noe.
There are no records of the reason for this change. There was no issue of grand
jury secrecy or investigative confidentiality here – it was a political
decision, one that Mrs. Bates must have been knowledgeable about. If Bates was
proud of it, why didn’t she trumpet it? She certainly did with other things.
2) There are no records of deals the prosecutors made with Noe affiliates
who apparently did exactly the same thing he did but weren’t criminally charged
and instead allowed to repay. These were people whose activities didn’t get any
public scrutiny because they were removed from the formal audit by the narrowed
focus chosen by the Auditor of State. The circumstances suggest the prosecutors
had one approach for Noe and a different one for everyone else. One can’t know
for sure, however, because there are no records anywhere in the state archives.
A failure to keep records is a violation of Ohio law. Again, these aren’t
investigative records and there’s no reason why the public shouldn’t know or be
able access them.
3) The state hired a liquidator to manage the sale of the Coin Funds’
and Noe’s seized assets. The contract, like that with the external auditor, was
secret. The liquidator worked for many years and made many consequential decisions,
but the final accounting given to the Inspector General provided only very
generic data – not close enough to follow in any detail. Why? Well, there’s no correspondence at all
in the files. There’s also no evidence that the Auditor of State examined what
the liquidator did. I see no reason to believe that the liquidating firm was
anything but honest, but an Auditor of State by definition is in the “trust but
verify” category and should do due diligence on a contract where people have
easy access to liquid assets. Most likely, a careful review was done. But
the records that should be there are gone. That’s critical.
The
missing records are a far more important theme than the (non-existent) missing
money. A pattern of missing records suggests that investigators didn’t want the
public to know what they did.