This is cool but I think it gives people a false sense of security that their lawmakers aren't taking financial advantage of the positions they're in. Surely if a Senator came across a lucrative but illegal opportunity to profit off of some kind of information they become privy too, they'd do it in a way that will bypass the Senate Financial Disclosure Database, such as having friends/family trade by proxy for them, selling that valuable info to the highest bidder and getting paid in bitcoin, etc.
This is a reasonable concern. And indeed we only (currently) track holdings of publicly-traded securities, where for some senators a decent fraction of assets are in privately-held companies or things like property investments. We take some solace in the fact that officials are required to disclose trades by spouses + dependents (which we include in our calculations), but you're right that we could be missing more illicit activity.
We hope that this work highlights potential dangers of allowing officials to trade in individual stocks, and encourage more robust legislation that would limit the sort of activity you're describing. Obviously very idealistic, but that's the goal.
Why do you care about a Ukranian gas company's hiring practices? If they want to waste money overpaying for an unqualified board member simply for name association that's on them. Nobody in this country is affected. The better question is what is the current President's unqualified son-in-law doing handling middle east peace talks AND heading the coronavirus task force. Those things definitely do impact Americans.
Do you have any evidence, even circumstantial that points to Biden getting his son on that board?
Seems a lot more likely that the board recruited the son to the board hoping it would provide political cover. Which it also does not appear to have worked since Biden requested the dismissal of the AG that had already closed investigations into Barisma.
