Carter accused of illegitimate payments

Press, 9 August 1976, Page 8

Carter accused of illegitimate payments

NZPA-Reuter Los Angeles The Jimmy Carter Democratic Presidential campaign gave donations to black ministers who supported him m the California primary nominating election and paid out other amounts that were not properly accounted for, the “Los Angeles Times” said in its Sunday editions yesterday.

The Carter campaign might have to return SUSISO,OOO in Federal funds because of financial irregularities, the newspaper reported. The report said that the -ewspaper had surveyed public records in Ohio. California. and New Jersey and turned up several instances in which campaign funds spent in black and minority communities lacked required receipts.

Mr Paul Hemmann. Mr Carter’s national administrator whose duties include financial accounting, was ouoted as saying that

irregularities in financial reporting might force the Carter campaign to return SUSISO,OOO of the SUS3M in Government matching funds it had received.

Shortly before the June 8 California primary—which Mr Carter lost to California Governor Edmund G. (“Jerry”) Brown, jun.,—the Carter campaign gave a total of SUSSOOO to four black ministers in the Oakland Bay area, the “Los Angeles Times” said. In Washington, a spokesman for the Federal Election Commission said campaign committees were required to keep records of all expenditures, but only those of SUSIOO or more must be itemised in monthly reports to the commission.

The spokesman said the commission had not determined that the Carter campaign must reimburse any money, and that Mr Hemmann’s comments thus appear to be premature.

A complicated land deal ■ involving Twentieth CenturyFox 10 years ago might have been aimed at making Mr Ronald Reagan financially free to run for president this year, “Rolling Stone” magazine said on Saturday. The magazine quoted an unidentified Democratic state official as saying: “We spent a long time looking into this because it always smelled funny to me. We came away with’ the feeling that Twentieth Century-Fox was a pawn in the deal. We figured Reagan’s gang had actually put up the money.” “Rolling Stone” said the official’s hypothesis was that “secret sugar daddies” financed the deal, using Fox as a conduit to “insure Mr Reagan was financially free to run for President.”