Debarred short seller with checkered past lobbied Education Department on for-profit colleges

[Geee]

Daily Caller:

Before a jury found Manuel Asensio had illegally defamed a company whose demise he would profit from, and before securities regulators barred him from employment in the banking industry for the rest of his life, he used to take down companies with savage reports under the banner of his investment bank, Asensio & Company.

Then, as an “activist” short seller, he would compile damning research on a business, take a market bet its stock would go down, publish his report, and profit when it did go down.

Nowadays, Asensio is the director of the Alliance for Economic Stability (AES), a non-profit organization lobbying the Education Department on for-profit or “career” colleges, one of a group of short sellers who have teamed up with the Obama administration and a slew of left wing interest groups to push for strict regulations of the sector.

Documents obtained by The Daily Caller show Asensio’s group lobbied the agency vigorously with the benefit of surprisingly intimate knowledge of a federal government investigation into one specific firm, Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

For instance, e-mails from Asensio’s group indicate he possessed, or at least knew a great deal about, a draft audit of Bridgepoint by the Education Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) that had not been released to the public — or even to Bridgepoint.