Ex-Member of Watchdog Panel Pays Fine of $13,400 for Not Listing Business Ties

A politically well-connected Los Angeles real estate investor, Mark Nathanson, was fined $13,400 Wednesday for failing to disclose millions of dollars in business interests while serving as a member of the watchdog Little Hoover Commission between 1983 and 1985.

Nathanson agreed to pay the fine after admitting to what investigators of the state Fair Political Practices Commission called “repeated and wholesale omissions” from his required financial disclosure statements.

Appointed in January to the state Coastal Commission by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), Nathanson in a written statement said he paid little attention to conflict-of-interest statements that he was required to file as a Little Hoover Commission member, “because I assumed no one would care. Obviously--having just paid over $13,000 in fines--I was wrong.”

Each year, public officials are required to file reports in which they disclose their economic holdings and sources of income as evidence that they are not profiting from their positions in government.

Nathanson accused the Fair Political Practices Commission of using his case “to send a message to everyone who has to file,” and described the fine as “excessive” because there was “no hint of a conflict of interest” uncovered by the commission’s investigators.

Nathanson earlier this year told investigators that he found the economic disclosure documents “terribly boring and useless,” according to a commission staff report.

As a condition of the settlement, Nathanson is required to amend a series of economic disclosure statements he had filed as a member of the Little Hoover Commission. A spokeswoman for the Fair Political Practices Commission said she was unaware of any problems with the documents that Nathanson, as a Coastal Commission member, has filed more recently.

Former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. appointed Nathanson in 1983 to the Little Hoover Commission, an unpaid panel charged with investigating the efficiency of government agencies. He stepped down in November, 1985.

Several years earlier, in 1977, members of that commission had refused to reveal their incomes, arguing that the economic disclosure requirements of the Political Reform Act did not apply to them. However, the courts ruled otherwise, settling the issue long before Nathanson was appointed.

In his initial conflict-of-interest statement, Nathanson revealed only that he owned Mark Nathanson Enterprises and that he had an ownership interest in three Beverly Hills rental properties, each of which was worth more than $100,000.

Omissions Listed

However, the Fair Political Practices Commission investigators uncovered a long list of financial transactions that Nathanson failed to report, including:

- A $145,090 investment in Desert Arabian Bloodstock Inc.

- The trading of more than $100,000 in Financial Corporation of America stock.

- Rental income of more than $70,000 over two years from a six-unit apartment building.

- The sale of personal furniture for more than $46,280 and two cars for $22,290.

- Holdings in two Beverly Hills properties. He purchased one for $550,000 and said he sold the other for $1,120,122.

- A $1,000-a-week consulting contract with Aaron Spelling Productions Inc. over the last two months of 1983.

- Millions of dollars in real estate loans, including a $1-million loan secured by his personal residence and office.