Saturday, July 21, 2012

Several Controversial Banks Curb Lobbying Expenses

Amid recent media reports of banks manipulating interest rates, cheating consumers, and doing business with money launderers, the Center for Responsive Politics' early review of second quarter lobbying filings reveals a a noticeable drop in lobbying expenditures for a few (now infamous) banks.

Overall, banks maintained strong visibility in the halls of Congress and at the regulatory agencies. But Barclays, whose CEO Bob Diamond resigned last month after the British bank was fined for manipulating information that affects a key interest rate known as LIBOR, barely registered a lobbying presence over the last three months. The disgraced bank reported spending only $160,000 in the most recent quarter, and $450,000 in the first quarter of 2012.

By this time last year, Barclays had spent $2,300,000, almost four times its 2012 year-to-date amount.

Barclays lobbyist Patrick Durkin has managed to keep himself busy during the lull, however, becoming the top lobbyist-bundler for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Durkin has brought in more than $1.1 million for Romney.

Second-quarter filings from Bank of America, also implicated in the LIBOR scandal, show a similar, though not quite as dramatic, decrease in expenditures. A second quarter total of $500,000 (including the bank's subsidiaries) brings its 2012 lobbying spending to $1,370,000 thus far, a drop of nearly 13 percent from the $1,570,000 in expenditures it posted for the first six months of 2011. The banking giant's outlays for lobbying were much higher in 2010, when it spent $1,190,000 in the second quarter alone.

Read more: http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2012/07/banking-lobbying-roundup.html

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