The Washington insider has dedicated his post-Senate career to getting rich thanks to his political connections. And part of Bayh’s reported assets of up to $48 million is a holding in Athene, an offshore annuity company worth somewhere between $1 million and $5 million.
Athene, which is owned by Apollo Global Management – the company Bayh met with during his votes for hire scheme – is defending itself in a class action lawsuit alleging that the company is fleecing senior citizens.
That’s right: Evan Bayh is getting rich off of an offshore investment scheme that’s targeting senior citizens.
Evan Bayh, the former Democratic senator from Indiana and current Senate candidate, has at least $1 million in holdings with a Bermuda-based insurance company, Athene, that has a business model that a class action lawsuit is challenging as a bait-and-switch scam.
Athene’s business plan, the suit claims, is to buy up the annuities of retirees that had previously been invested in bonds and blue chip stocks, and instead pump their money into the risky bets of a private equity firm. That firm turns out to be Apollo Global Management ― where Bayh is a highly paid senior adviser ― which actually owns Athene, so if the gamble pays off, Athene’s parent company gets rich. If it flops, the retirees take the hit.
Apollo and Athene have another shell company, AP Alternative Assets L.P., or AAA, in between them, but the interrelationship is readily apparent. A subsidiary of Apollo even handles Athene’s investments, extracting fees all along the way.
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Bayh’s rapacious grab for cash since his retirement has been extraordinary even by Clintonian standards, but it is made all the more poignant by the poetic bromides he offered on his way out.
“I want to be engaged in an honorable line of work,” Bayh told Ezra Klein in October 2010. He said he wanted to find work where he could come home and tell his wife, “Dear, do you know what we got done today? I’ve got this really bright kid in my class, and do you know what he asked me, and here’s what I told him, and I think I saw a little epiphany moment go off in his mind.”
We have since learned ― thanks to the Associated Press, which obtained his Senate schedule ― that by the time he was having this heady conversation, he had already been meeting with executives at Apollo, as well as the brass at the oil company Marathon and the law firm and lobby shop McGuire Woods. He went on to take jobs with all three, joining Apollo, sitting on Marathon’s board of directors, and working as a strategic adviser at McGuire Woods.
Bayh is what’s wrong with Washington, and the predicament he has put Indiana voters in is emblematic of the problems with our system of government. (Ryan Grim, Ben Walsh, and Zach Carter, “New Documents Show Evan Bayh Dove Head-First Into A Controversial Bermuda-Based Insurance Scheme,” Huffington Post, 10/26/16)