Bush under pressure on corporate fraudsters

US senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, on Sunday called for the release of the case file of a 1991 insider trading investigation of George W. Bush, saying discrepancies in the president's account have raised new questions.

Mr Daschle's comments raised the pressure on the administration before a speech by Mr Bush on Tuesday, in which he is expected to announce tougher criminal penalties for executives who commit fraud. They also come as the Senate prepares this week to vote on tough accounting reform legislation, a bill the White House opposes.

The Democrats further turned up the heat with the publication of a 60-page report by the Senate sub-committee on investigations, chaired by Senator Carl Levin, in which the Enron board is charged with contributing to the energy trader's collapse by ignoring repeated warning signs that wrongdoing was under way among executives.

The report said the board - that included Lord Wakeham, the former British cabinet minister, who served on the audit committee - witnessed "numerous indications of questionable practices" over several years which it chose to ignore.

The 1991 Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry involved Mr Bush's sale of 212,140 shares in Houston-based oil group Harken Energy for $849,000, just two months before Harken announced a $23.2m quarterly loss. Mr Bush was a member of Harken's board at the time of the sale, which occurred before he became Texas governor.

Mr Bush was cleared of insider trading charges but last week Ari Fleischer, his spokesman, acknowledged some of the paperwork required to disclose the 1990 sale was filed more than eight months late. He insisted the oversight was the fault of Harken lawyers required to fill out the forms, but Mr Bush has said the forms must have been lost by the SEC.

"The president would do well to ask the SEC to release the file . . . let everybody see just what is there," Mr Daschle said on the CBS News programme Face the Nation.