Needham - The three Democratic candidates for state auditor sparred this week over reports that candidate and Worcester County Sheriff Guy Glodis may have violated campaign finance laws during his 2004 campaign.
“In light of these stories the sheriff has put the people of Worcester County in a tough position about whether or not they’re going to trust their government,” said Mike Lake, during a joint meeting with reporters from GateHouse Media and Wicked Local on Aug. 26.
“The sheriff should consider resigning in these last few months [of his term],” Lake said.
Glodis dismissed Lake’s suggestion, defended his position and then tried to change the conversation by raising an ethics violation committed by candidate Suzanne Bump when she was a state representative in 1992.
“There’s only one candidate who’s actually been fined by the Ethics Commission for illegally excepting gifts,” Glodis said looking at Bump. “I just wanted to know if she would disclose that information while we’re here.”
An Aug. 24 article in the Boston Globe revealed Glodis received a $20,000 personal loan through a third party from childhood friend Amit Mathur just days before making a $22,000 loan to his 2004 sheriff campaign. Mathur, a former hedge fund manager, was later charged with bilking his investors out of millions of dollars.
“He took that money and deposited it in a personal account. Fine, that’s what you can do with a loan from a friend,” said Bump, the former head of the Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development in the Patrick administration. “But then within days that money, plus $2,000, was put into his campaign fund.”
Glodis fired back by claming that the loan was for home improvements and had nothing to do with that campaign.
“I needed some money to live, I’m not ashamed of that, I needed money for some home improvements,” he said. “Obviously it wasn’t a political loan because almost half of it was paid back before the election was even over.”
Bump also accused Glodis of hiding Mathur’s part in the loan when he reported to the Office of Campaign and Political Finance that it had come from Robert Zannotti - one of Mathur’s business partners - without mentioning that it had been written on Mathur’s behalf.
“When Guy Glodis made his actual disclosure to the State Ethics Commission he did not actually disclose the source of the loans,” Bump said. “It is reasonable to speculate that the reason he did not disclose the true source of the funds is because it was coming from a man who was under SEC investigation.”
But Glodis said that he’d always been truthful about the money’s origins.
“The reason why it was recorded as from the business partner is that it came from the business partner’s account,” he said. “If I didn’t write his name down I think I’d be in a lot more trouble now than I am today with my two opponents trying to politicize it.”
Had he’d known about the investigation into Mathur’s funds, Glodis said he wouldn’t have gone to him for a loan in the first place.
“There wasn’t any idea back in September [when Glodis took the loan] that there was any investigation,” Glodis said. “Had I known that I wouldn’t have taken a dime.”
Glodis said that the matter had already been fully reviewed by the OCPF and therefore it’s recent resurfacing was simply an example of political mudslinging.
“This is a story that came out three years ago that somehow has been recycled two weeks before a primary,” Glodis said
Following a heated back and forth with Bump over his loan, Glodis sought to change the conversation by asking Bump to explain her ethics violation from 1992.
At time Bump and her husband were taken out to dinner and a show by an insurance lobbyist, an incident for which Bump was fined $600.
“She failed to disclose that she went for work as an insurance lobbyist for that same industry,” Glodis said, pointing out that after Bump lost reelection she too became a registered lobbyist in the insurance industry.
Bump didn’t deny the ethics violation; she said she wasn’t trying to hide anything, and that her lobbying had been in a different insurance area than the lobbyist who provided the entertainment.
“Contrary to what Guy has said, for months I have had on my website — in the interest of transparency — a link to that ethics report,” Bump said. “I would distinguish this event in [1992] from the pattern of OCPF violations for which [Glodis] had paid multiple fines.”
Lake took the opportunity to take a stab at both of his opponents.
“This goes back to the question of how an individual who has been cited for violations in campaign finance or ethics can maintain the integrity of the entire state government,” he said.
The Democratic primary is on Sept. 14.
Read more election stories on WickedLocal.com/politics
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