Fee for a dead man

Rancho Santa Fe's Gerald Parsky heads a Los Angeles private equity fund, Aurora Capital Group, which got more than $400 million in investment commitments from the giant California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS).

Aurora had hired Alfred Villalobos, a former CalPERS board member, to help it get the pension-fund business. According to the Sacramento Bee, Aurora has agreed to pay Villalobos's estate $2.3 million for the work he did swinging CalPERS money its way.

In January of this year, Villalobos, facing a corruption trial, committed suicide.

According to the Bee, Villalobos earned about $50 million in commissions after snagging billions of dollars of investment commitments from CalPERS for his clients. After allegations surfaced in 2010 that Villalobos had bribed top CalPERS officials, Aurora stopped paying, claiming that his wrongdoing constituted a breach of contract. Now Aurora has reached a settlement, notes the Bee.

As the Reader reported in 2006, Parsky — George W. Bush's California advisor and former chairman of the University of California board of regents — uses the the Cayman Islands for his Aurora Capital deals. The Bee was unable to reach him, and when I tried to reach him in 2006, he did not respond to multiple faxes and emails.