LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jackson Stephens: Bert Lance
built 640 days ago
Jackson Stephens, who founded the group with his brother, Witt, were more than just lucky Arkansas bankers and billionaires. Stephens evidently built his career and fortune by being connected to the "right" people. He was a U.S. Naval Academy classmate of Jimmy Carter and during the Georgia bank scandals of President Carter’s Office of Management & Budget chief, Bert Lance. It was Jack Stephens who stepped in to bail Lance out of an extremely embarrassing financial debacle with Lance’s old bank, National Bank of Georgia.
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In the 1970s, Stephens became a national political fund-raiser for both parties, and has had continual access to the White House since. He was a business partner of Bert Lance, Carter's controversial Budget Director, and was Carter's roommate at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946. During the Reagan-Bush years, Stephens was a major contributor to the GOP. and his former wife, Mary Anne, served as co-chair for Bush's presidential campaign in Arkansas in 1988.
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Stephens Inc tries to sell Riady stock in the National Bank of Georgia. The Washington Post quotes a US banker suggesting that Riady is working for Suharto, who is trying to butter up Carter: "They think of this country like a 'regime' similar to their own and they just don't realize that such a ploy wouldn't work." There's no deal. Lance's bank will eventually be taken over by a BCCI front man -- Ghaith Pharaon. Pharaon later sells his bank to First American. Pharaon will be fined $37 million by the Federal Reserve Board and become a fugitive.
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Stephens, who is an avid golfer and chairman of the prestigious Masters Tournament Committee, is named in the court records as having brought Pharon together with Stephens' close friend Bert Lance. Lance was a former cabinet official under President Jimmy Carter who was forced to resign due to a banking scandal.
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