WASHINGTON, October 17, 2002 — The year 1990 started out on a high note for Harken Energy.

Earlier this summer, national media outlets reported on President George W. Bush's activities as a director with Texas oil company Harken Energy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The stories referenced documents obtained by the Center during the course of research for the The Buying of the President 2000, as well as two Center investigative reports.

WASHINGTON, October 16, 2002 — In 1976, George W. Bush was a freshly minted graduate of the Harvard Business School looking for a job.

The New York Daily News reported on July 30 that Harken Energy Corporation set up a Cayman Islands subsidiary, the Harken Bahrain Energy Company, on September 1, 1989, in connection with the company's $25 million contract to drill for oil off the coast of Bahrain, an island nation in the Persian Gulf.

July 25, 2002 — Documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show President George W. Bush met with the president and CEO of Harken Energy Corp. shortly before the controversial sale of the company's Aloha Petroleum subsidiary.

July 19, 2002 — In his July 8, 2002, press conference, President George W. Bush told reporters "to look back on the directors' minutes" for details of his knowledge of and involvement in the financial reporting of Harken Energy Corporation that was the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation in the early 1990s.

July 12, 2002 — Since posting the last batch of documents yesterday, we received requests for more Harken-related documents. Today, we are posting Harken Energy Corporation's 1989 Form 10K, which includes information on the Aloha transaction and the loans George W. Bush received from the company, and the company's quarterly reports from the period ending June 30, 1990 (during which time Bush sold more than 212,000 shares of Harken stock) and the following quarter, which ended September 30, 1990 (when Harken declared its $23.2 million loss).

July 11, 2002 — The Center for Public Integrity, as a public service, is posting a second round of the documents that we obtained from the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Freedom of Information Act.

July 3, 2002 — Because of a column by Paul Krugman that ran in The New York Times and a follow-up Washington Post story, there has been renewed interest in two reports the Center published concerning George W. Bush's days as a director of Harken Energy. We published the first on October 2, 2000 and the second on April 4, 2001.