Prairie State Wire

State Rep. Brad Stephens (R-Chicago) is calling out Gov. J.B. Pritzker for “breaking a promise” to “purge his personal portfolio of any companies that do business with the state.”

Stephens made his comments after it was learned a blind trust set up for Pritzker to avoid conflicts of interest bought stock in Centene Corp. in 2020 before the governor made decisions that aided the company.   

“In 2019, Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker made a pledge that he would purge his personal portfolio of any companies that do business with the state,” Stephens wrote in a Facebook post.  “The governor has broken yet another promise to the people of Illinois by investing in one of our state's biggest Medicaid contractors."

According to a report by the Better Government Association (BGA), the purchase of stock in the health insurance giant was made on behalf of the billionaire governor by trustees at Northern Trust, which was appointed by Pritzker to independently manage his portfolio to separate those investment decisions from his role as the state’s most powerful elected official.  

"The investment in Centene — which collected more than $2.6 billion from state Medicaid contracts in the first half of 2021 alone — exposes pitfalls in the blind-trust arrangement that still leaves the nation’s richest governor open to potential conflicts of interest," the report said.

Experts interviewed by the BGA said the governor could have avoided the potential conflict by instructing his trust managers to refrain from investing in state contractors. 

Asked whether the governor took steps to recuse himself from decisions that directly affected the company’s finances, his spokeswoman said he had not.

“The governor is not involved in the contracting process related to Centene,” Jordan Abudayyeh, Pritzker’s communication director, told BGA. “There is nothing he would have to recuse himself from.”

She referred all other questions about the trust investment in Centene to Pritzker’s campaign officials. 

Experts interviewed by the BGA said there is a conflict of interest if the state has contracts with a company in which the governor’s trust holds stock. “Absolutely,” said Eleanor Eagan of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, based in Washington, D.C. “I don’t really see how one can argue otherwise.”

According to BGA, the stock purchase was first disclosed May 3, 2021, four days after Pritzker signed his annual economic disclosure statement. The document detailed real and potential financial conflicts of interest that all state elected officials must fill out. He listed Centene among more than 300 investments in 2020, each with a value of more than $5,000.

Pritzker's lawyer wrote, in part, "His blind trust is just that: blind. He receives no information regarding potential investments ... He has no knowledge of the trust’s current assets. To suggest otherwise is ... potentially libelous," Fox 32 reported.