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Leading the White House privatization initiative is Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who received a $285 million dollar payout upon leaving the bank and taking a job as the director of Trump’s National Economic Council. As Cohn has led the infrastructure privatization initiative from that perch, Goldman Sachs declared that it continues to look at “new business initiatives” that revolve around taking ownership of public assets, according to Securities and Exchange Commission documents reviewed by International Business Times.

Cohn is spearheading the administration’s infrastructure policy despite a White House official telling Bloomberg News in February that he “will recuse himself from participating in any matter directly involving his former employer.” That pledge seemed at the time to show that Cohn was following ethics rules Trump enacted in January. Those rules require federal officials to sign an ethics pledge in which they agree to wait two years before they “participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer.”

Those rules, however, empower Trump to waive the restrictions whenever he wants. Whether or not Cohn has received such a waiver remains secret: the administration has not released a list of waivers, and has moved to block federal agencies from disclosing such waivers to federal ethics regulators.

As a result, ethics experts say, there is no way to know if Cohn is wading into ethically murky waters.

The six-page initiative rolled out by the Trump administration earlier this week detailed plans to spend $200 billion to “incentivize additional non-Federal funding” and reward private investors for buying and maintaining government-owned infrastructure properties, like bridges, airports and toll highways.

Those initiatives echo plans laid out by Goldman Sachs in its SEC filings dating back to at least 2008. In a section of its most recent annual SEC filings about the company’s “recent and planned business initiatives,” the bank details its ongoing public infrastructure investments.

More: http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/trump-administration-conflicts-interest-how-gary-cohn-could-sell-us-infrastructure

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