Corporate change agent
Richard Moore was irritated. Walt Disney executives had asked for a meeting with Moore, North Carolina's state treasurer, to address his criticisms about the company's management and boardroom secrecy. But instead of sending a finance team to answer an investor's questions in March, Disney sent a public-relations squad--even the new head of the Muppets was on hand. Then, former chairman Michael Eisner bailed from the trip the day before after reportedly taking ill at a Starbucks. He checked in by phone.
What's instructive is not Moore's outrage over the snub but the fact that Disney worried about him in the first place. State retirement funds, the 401(k)-like plans for bureaucrats, and the officials who run them are beginning to flex their muscle and shake up Wall Street. Moore, who manages North Carolina's $61 billion state pension fund, is a point man in that movement. While hardly a household name like New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer--who just last week filed a lawsuit seeking the repayment of more than $100 million of compensation from former New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso--Moore is nonetheless making a name for himself. A camera-friendly southerner with nice hair, good looks, and a London School of Economics pedigree, Moore has joined Spitzer in galvanizing the investor-protection movement among state officials. His visibility earned him an appointment to the NYSE's new executive committee.
Airtime. When the fracas over Disney was at its peak in late February, Moore ordered North Carolina state pension fund managers, who handle $56.5 million in Disney stock, to withhold support for Eisner. Moore's dissent landed him on ABC's World News Tonight, and CNBC dispatched a satellite truck to a political fundraiser in the remote northeastern corner of the state to put Moore on the air. "Mr. Moore, in a variety of ways, was an enthusiastic participant, shall we say, in some of the events around here in past months," says Richard Bernard, the stock exchange's general counsel.
Moore is a tireless self-promoter who has driven across the state handing out checks, like a sweepstakes host, from the state's unclaimed-property fund. The residents who received the abandoned money knew nothing of it until Moore's office called to set up the stunt, with TV crews in tow. Moore, a Democrat, even showed up at the office of the president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, with a check for him in hand.
In 2003, a year ahead of his current campaign for a second term, Moore spent $500,000 of the interest earned from the unclaimed-property fund for an ad campaign telling North Carolinians to log on to find out whether they had money due them. The fund is a collection of unclaimed payments such as utility deposits, dividend checks, and final paychecks. Moore appeared in the TV ads but stopped running them in December--right before a state law kicked in prohibiting elected officials from appearing in public-service announcements during election years. Defying his critics, Moore pointed out that in three years he had doubled both the amount of money in the fund and the amount returned to its rightful owners.
advertisement
