This is “Sunshine Week,” not because it is almost spring and the weather is nice but because it is a reminder that we supposedly live in a nation of press freedom and transparent government.

My contribution to the “celebration” is a reminder of something that got considerable scrutiny (but few solid answers) during the 2014 election, but has now seemingly passed into the recesses of our collective minds: What did our state government officials know and when did they know it about Joop Bollen privatizing the state agency that was responsible for the EB-5 visas-for-$500,000-state investment program.

The lackluster interim legislative committee that “investigated” this matter that took place during then Gov. Mike Rounds’ administration was little more than a political sop.They subpoenaed no one and most of its members played defense for Rounds, who was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, as well as current Gov. Dennis Daugaard and the S.D. Board of Regents.

They basically blamed the dead guy, the late Richard Benda, who was secretary of the department of economic and development, who was nominally (but not actually) in charge of keeping an eye on the flying Dutchman, Joop Bollen. Bollen was actually under the “control” of the Board of Regents, who, if they had an 11- foot pole, would have used that to not touch him, his office or his shenanigans instead of the proverbial 10-foot pole.

What did Bollen do and what did the Rounds Administration and the Board of Regents let him do? Let’s recap:

1. Paid him a lot of money.
2. Provided no oversight.
3. Allowed him to act as his agency’s own attorney in lawsuits, even though he was not a lawyer and did not comply with South Dakota law in handling lawsuits against state entities.
4. Self-dealt with himself to move the state agency into his own private company, in the process screwing the taxpayers of the state out of millions of dollars in fees.

The 2016 legislature passed a “close the barn door behind the runaway horse” act that says doing this sort of thing is against the law in the future.

We still don’t know the depth to which Rounds knew what was going on with Benda or Bollen. We have an inkling that the S.D. Board of Regents knew what was going on but didn’t want to know anything—call it the “Sgt. Schultz Defense—‘I know nothing! I see nothing!’” And we don’t know for sure what our current governor, who fortunately had the bright idea of shutting down the program, knew and when he knew it when he was Rounds’ lieutenant governor.

And, the Benda death, ruled a suicide, is still shrouded in mystery and a lack of released documents.

So South Dakota, let’s shine a little more sunshine on this sordid incident and maybe we won’t laugh when we hear that our state was once called “The Sunshine State.”

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