What are the odds of selling all of the stock just a few weeks before the stock takes a nose dive? What a lucky guy he is.
Precisely a month later, after the stock was sold, its price tumbled 9 percent when executives in the company -- HCA Inc., which was founded by Frist's father and on whose board Frist's brother serves -- disclosed that hospital admissions of insured patients were lower than expected, depressing profits in the second quarter.
Several ethics experts and watchdogs said they found it odd that Frist could intervene to order such a sale when the HCA stock was ostensibly out of his reach in blind trusts. Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, said, "The notion that you have a blind trust but you can tell your trustee when to sell stock in it just doesn't make any sense. It means you have a seeing eye trust and not a blind trust. It's ridiculous."
Larry Noble, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, agreed that the arrangement "seems to defeat the purpose of a blind trust. Somebody else is supposed to have control over it to avoid potential conflicts of interest. If you can just reach in and sell stock, it seems it defeats the whole purpose."
Jan W. Baran, a Republican ethics expert at Wiley Rein & Fielding LLP, said, "That's the question, 'What changed?' " to compel Frist to sell his stock when he did.
