Conflict Of Interest

The U.S. Supreme Court put elected judges on notice Monday that they must step aside from deciding cases involving big-money donors who helped them win their jobs. The decision comes after a decade in which corporate interests and trial lawyers have waged increasingly costly campaigns for 21 states' supreme court seats. Most are in the Great Lakes region or the South.

Rep. Maxine Waters, one of Los Angeles' most enduring liberal politicians, has come under scrutiny because of bailout funds that went to a bank in which her husband had owned stock and served on the board. Waters was a senior member of the congressional committee dealing with the financial crisis when OneUnited Bank -- one of the nation's largest minority-owned institutions -- received $12 million in bailout funds.

In the annals of wrongheaded things done with the best intentions, the California stem cell program has always been in a category of its own. The $6-billion program was enacted by voters in 2004 as Proposition 71 after a campaign of exceptional intellectual dishonesty, featuring vignettes of sufferers from diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other heartbreaking diseases for which it seemed to promise imminent cures through research into embryonic stem cells.

A pension board appointee of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa may have violated city law by accepting a campaign donation from a Los Angeles businessman whose client sought a $10-million investment from the board. Kelly Candaele, who served until three weeks ago on the board of the Los Angeles City Employees' Retirement System, received $1,000 on Dec. 2 from Dan Weinstein, managing director of Wetherly Capital Group. That firm pitches investments to city and state pension boards.

Placentia officials vowed Friday to fight claims by Caltrans that the small north Orange County city owes the state more than $36 million. The money was spent for a controversial rail corridor project that devastated the town's finances. "Our understanding of the contract is that the state has no legal right to ask for money back unless there is an erroneous or mistaken payment," Mayor Scott Nelson said during a news conference at City Hall.

Lawyers for former Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona said Thursday that dozens of federal prosecutors have disqualified themselves from prosecuting his corruption case -- and the defense wants to know why. Carona's lawyers disclosed in federal court in Santa Ana that federal prosecutors in Los Angeles and Orange counties have declared an unspecified conflict of interest and said they could not be involved in Carona's prosecution.

A former president of the Los Angeles Board of Building and Safety Commissioners has been charged with three criminal conflict-of-interest counts for voting to approve permits for an engineering firm that had hired his company, a prosecutor said Friday. The Los Angeles County district attorney filed the misdemeanor charges against Efren R. Abratique, who is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.

Aides to Sen. John McCain confronted a telecommunications lobbyist in late 1999 and asked her to distance herself from the Arizona senator during the presidential campaign he was about to launch, according to one of McCain's longest-serving political strategists. John Weaver, who was McCain's closest confidant until leaving his presidential campaign last year, told the Washington Post that he met with Vicki Iseman at a cafe in Union Station in Washington and urged her to stay away from McCain.

The Los Angeles County district attorney's Public Integrity Unit is reviewing whether a high-level consultant for the Los Angeles Unified School District's building program engaged in a conflict of interest. David Demerjian, head of the unit, said Wednesday that his office has been looking at Bassam Raslan, a district regional director of construction and an owner of TBI Associates, which he co-founded to supply staff to the district's $20-billion school construction effort.

Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino, a rising political star and the second most powerful official in Mexico, came under growing pressure to quit Monday over charges that he acted improperly by signing government contracts on behalf of his family's gasoline business while serving as a top energy official. The 36-year-old Mourino, a confidant of President Felipe Calderon who has been mentioned as a possible successor, denies wrongdoing.