11/2020
A watchdog group filed a complaint on Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleging that Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., abused his office to enrich himself through insider trading. The allegations stem from a Wednesday report in the Daily Beast, which described Perdue's investment in a company that makes submarine parts. Perdue sold that investment for a healthy profit while he took the lead on a funding bill which eventually awarded lucrative defense contracts to the same company. In 2019, shortly before he was appointed as the chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower, Perdue invested $190,000 in BWX, one of only two or three companies contracted to make key parts for Virginia-class submarines. Perdue, the multimillionaire former CEO of Dollar General and a highly active stock trader, had never invested in the company before, according to the report. Perdue then began work on the funding bill, which ultimately secured $4.7 billion of government funds for Virginia-class submarines. He was reportedly "hand-picked by party leadership to hammer out the final version of the bill between the House and Senate." BWX stock rose while Perdue pushed for the funding, and he sold his shares for tens of thousands of dollars in profit, according to his 2019 financial disclosure forms.
This is not the first time Perdue has come under scrutiny for allegations of insider trading. The Daily Beast
reported in September that Perdue appeared to have capitalized on debit card regulations he had worked to weaken. And this spring, Perdue, along with several other lawmakers, including fellow multimillionaire Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, was
swept up in an insider trading scandal related to tens of thousands of dollars in stock purchases made on the day he received a private Senate briefing on the coronavirus pandemic in January. Perdue and Loeffler both face runoff elections in January. The races will determine whether Democrats or Republicans will control the U.S. Senate.
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