Monday, April 13, 2009


Congressional dealmaker and incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel made millions of dollars brokering deals of another sort as an investment banker.

Emanuel was a fundraiser for Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, directed the Bill Clinton presidential campaign’s finance committee and was a senior adviser to Clinton in the White House, where he helped broker the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Congress.

But after he left his post in 1998, political friends helped him land a job with the investment banking firm Wasserstein Perella, and Emanuel made out nicely when the company was bought by investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort, Barron’s columnist Jim McTague reported.

Emanuel’s biggest deal was investment bank Goldner Rauner’s purchase of the alarm company SecurityLink from SBC Communications for $479 million in 2000. In what McTague calls “perhaps the greatest coup,” Emanuel convinced SBC to provide 80 percent of the funding for the purchase.

By the time Emanuel left the firm in January to prepare for what was to be a successful run for Congress, he had made $16.2 million in 2.5 years, The New York Times reported.

During his stint as an investment banker, Emanuel also helped utility company Unicom in an $82 billion merger with Peco Energy, which created Exelon, a utility with nearly $19 billion in annual revenue.

Exelon has 17 nuclear reactors, the most in the U.S., and McTague wonders if Emanuel will “recuse himself on nuclear-energy

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