Our state is about to have one of its Electoral College votes cast by an infamous white collar criminal.

William Rauwerdink, an ex-con West Bloomfield Township businessman, is known best in financial circles from Metro Detroit to Wall Street for a $285 million swindle of his company’s investors. On Dec. 19, barring a miraculous recount result declaring Hillary Clinton as the Michigan winner of the popular vote, Rauwerdink will play his constitutional role and cast one of Michigan’s 16 Electoral College votes for Donald Trump. That appointment as an Elector by the state Republican Party will enshrine Rauwerdink’s name in the National Archives for all to see, in perpetuity.

Rauwerdink, 66, was indicted in 2003 by federal prosecutors on 16 counts of fraud related to his role as chief financial officer of a digital-imaging company, Lason Inc. of Troy, that did business with several major corporations, including the Detroit Three automakers.

This was not some nickel-and-dime scam. In 2014, a Wayne State University professor who studies white-collar crime called it “one of the worst accounting frauds ever” before it was upstaged by much bigger scams at Enron and WorldCom.

After Rauwerdink admitted to cooking the books at the Troy firm, the company CFO pleaded guilty to mail, wire and bank fraud, and received a prison sentence in 2007 of three years and nine months, followed by two years of court-supervised release, restitution payments of $115 million to Lason’s former shareholders, and $170 million in restitution to Lason’s lenders, a 14-member bank group led by Bank One Michigan, now a part of JPMorgan Chase. He was released from prison in 2010.

His next endeavor was to engage in Republican Party politics.

Based on a 2015 Deadline Detroit report, Michigan GOP officials learned that Rauwerdink — at the time a member of the party’s State Central Committee – had played the lead role in a notorious financial fraud case. They were stunned.

At the time, Paul Welday, a prominent former Oakland County GOP chairman, summed up the party’s reaction to Rauwerdink’s secrets in remarks to the Detroit Free Press. “I’m a little shell-shocked, like everybody else,” said Welday, who died last April. “I guarantee you, nobody knew anything about this.”

But once everybody knew all about Rauwerdink’s shady history, he still won election at that February 2015 state convention to the 14th Congressional District Executive Committee.

Rauwerdink now holds four GOP party positions in Oakland and the 14th Congressional District, which covers a wide swath through Detroit to the suburbs surrounding Pontiac.

Next, at the Republican state convention in August, the delegates brushed aside the past and granted Rauwerdink a fifth post – a seat in the Electoral College if Trump carried the state. He will cast his vote on Monday in perhaps the most consequential and controversial Electoral College election in U.S. history.

You can read more here.

Recent Posts: