Metro

‘Trolling for favors

Bill Lynch (Getty Images)

The city Comptroller’s Office is playing fast and Liu-se with ethics.

The political consultants who helped run Comptroller John Liu’s campaign are now lobbying his office on behalf of money managers who want a slice of the city’s $103 billion pension funds, which Liu oversees.

Lobbyists at Bill Lynch Associates — which Liu’s campaign paid $95,000 last year — used their access to try to set up meetings between Liu’s staff and private investors, according to e-mails obtained by The Post.

“The comptroller will have to weather concerns that he’s mixing politics and business,” Gene Russianoff, of the good-government group NYPIRG, said about the e-mails.

On Aug. 11, a top lobbyist at Lynch’s firm, Luther Smith, e-mailed Liu’s right-hand man, Eric Eve, asking for the comptroller’s staff to meet with two investors.

“I hope you can move these requests along,” Smith wrote Eve. “I’m only requesting meetings (which we won’t attend) and neither of these individuals are clients at this time.”

The e-mail came after Smith’s efforts to set up meetings with lower-level staffers failed.

“I’ve reached my wits end after months of trying to schedule two meetings with staff in the Comptroller’s office,” he wrote.

The role that middlemen play in getting investors a slice of the pension pie — and lucrative management fees — has been under scrutiny since scandal engulfed former state Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who pleaded guilty to corruption this month.

Liu has defended the use of middlemen, known as placement agents, saying they can help women- and minority-owned investment firms get in the door.

Despite the efforts of Bill Lynch Associates, neither of the investors has yet gotten access to Liu’s office, according to Liu spokeswoman Sharon Lee.

“Mr. Eve did not ask for nor facilitate any meetings between the companies and the comptroller’s office,” Lee said.

But when the lobbyists weren’t asking favors of the Comptroller’s Office, Liu’s staff was asking favors from the lobbyists.

In one April e-mail, Eve, a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton, asked Lynch to help his wife’s nonprofit. Eve’s wife, Felicia, was going to South Africa to close a land deal for singer Alicia Keys’ anti-AIDS foundation.

So Eve turned to Lynch — a one-time deputy mayor who was once an adviser to former South African President Nelson Mandela — to arrange for his wife to get face time with two top South African officials.

“Mtgs with those below would help to move this cause along significantly,” Eve wrote Lynch.

The City Charter prohibits public officials from using their positions to benefit their spouses, but it’s not clear that the e-mail crossed that line.

“Mr. Eve and Mr. Lynch are longstanding family friends, and the personal e-mail correspondence between them had nothing to do with any official business with the Comptroller’s Office,” Lee said.

Lynch said he has known Eve for more than 20 years “and was doing him a personal favor.” Lynch added that his colleague Smith “was unaware” of Eve’s request for help in South Africa.