DC probes NYU loan arrangers

From:  NYPOST

Funneled millions to execs

• By GEOFF EARLE in DC and JAMES COVERT in NY

EXCLUSIVE

In this Washington probe, no loan will go unturned.

Senate investigators may be done with Jack Lew, who’s already settling in to his job as treasury secretary — but now they’re training their sights on NYU, demanding the school cough up details on controversial loans and other fat compensation it gave to dozens of other top execs and faculty as well as Lew, The Post has learned.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) wants NYU to hand over documents for loans and other perks going back more than a decade, including terms of the cushy packages and how they were calculated.

JACK LEW Got “unusual” NYU benefits.

 

In confirmation hearings last month, Grassley grilled Lew on the $1.4 million loan he got from NYU on top of his more than $800,000 salary in a five-year stint as a top executive that ended in 2006. 

“NYU appears to have given Mr. Lew an unusual array of benefits in an unusually opaque way,” Grassley wrote in a letter yesterday to NYU president John Sexton. “So the actual value of his total compensation package is difficult to ascertain precisely.”

In an e-mail last week, NYU exec Martin Dorph told school officials that NYU and its law school currently have outstanding loans to 168 people, for a total of $72 million in loans floated by the university. 

Now Grassley wants to look into these financial arrangements at the tax-exempt university that receives millions of dollars in federal funds. 

On top of tax records dating back to 2000, Grassley wants NYU to fork over the minutes from every board meeting where loans to execs were discussed.

He likewise is demanding the names of all board members who gave a nod to loans and the names of all NYU officials who approved Lew’s controversial loan — much of which appears to have been forgiven as part of a $685,000 golden parachute. MORE