Adding to the story of Trump’s Postmaster General Louis DeJoy:
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy continues to hold a multimillion-dollar stake in his former company XPO Logistics, a United States Postal Service contractor, likely creating a major conflict of interest, according to newly obtained financial disclosures and ethics experts.
Outside experts who spoke to CNN were shocked that ethics officials at the postal service approved this arrangement, which allows DeJoy to keep at least $30 million in XPO holdings.
DeJoy and USPS have said he fully complied with the regulations.
Raising further alarms, on the same day in June that DeJoy divested large amounts of Amazon shares, he purchased stock options giving him the right to buy new shares of Amazon at a price much lower than their current market price, according to the disclosures. [CNN]
To the latter point, these fall into the class of stock trading known as call options. By buying these options while selling his current holdings, he expects to see shares of Amazon plunge in the near future, although the article doesn’t state an expiration date, so take “near future” as you will. As Amazon uses USPS for much of its delivery requirements, he may be banking on his “optimizations” on impacting Amazon in the near future.
Or, perhaps, he expects the Covid-19 pandemic to, again, negatively impact Amazon. Or even its cessation might. It’s difficult to say.
But it’s the former point that’s appalling. He should have been required to sell all of those holdings, and if USPS regulations are so lax that he can claim he’s in conformance with them, those regulations need reform.
In any case, even an appearance of a conflict of interest should be, and would be, avoided by public service employees. I would not be surprised if there’s criminal charges related to DeJoy in the near future.
