Business Leaders Against Nick
Arizona business leaders for Elijah Norton for Treasurer

We evaluate records for a living.

Nick Mansour is running on his business résumé. We read it the way we would read any other — line by line, with the filings attached. It does not hold up.

Dear Arizona,

We are Arizona business leaders. We have built companies, made payroll, answered to investors, and lived with the consequences of our own judgment. We know the difference between building something real and building something that simply grew.

Nick Mansour has asked Arizona to hire him as State Treasurer on the strength of his business record. That is a fair request, and it deserves a fair reading. So we did the work.

2007–09
Pacific Pulmonary Services Mansour served as Executive Vice President of Business Development. The company — operating as Braden Partners, L.P. — later paid $11.4 million, together with its general partner, to settle federal False Claims Act allegations that it billed Medicare and other federal health programs for home oxygen equipment without the physician authorization those programs required, and that it participated in an illegal cross-referral kickback arrangement with sleep clinics.
2022
Arizona College of Nursing With Mansour serving as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, the Arizona State Board of Nursing placed the college’s BSN program on probation for a minimum of 36 months. The Board’s findings describe leadership decisions to dismiss clinical faculty holding bachelor’s degrees, and repeated programmatic and course changes made without adequate notice or preparation for the dean, faculty, and students affected. The College was also sued multiple times — including in a federal class-action lawsuit — for fraud, enrolling students who were ineligible to practice, and even misappropriating over $2 million in COVID relief money that was supposed to go to students.

A regulator does not put a program on three years of probation over a paperwork dispute. That is a finding about how an institution was being run — and it happened on his watch, at a for-profit college whose students were carrying tuition debt at the time.

The State Treasurer manages roughly $32 billion in state funds and the endowment that helps pay for Arizona's schools. It is the most consequential stewardship job in state government, and it is not the place to take a chance on a record like this one.

His record isn’t the only thing that concerns us. For nearly 60 years, the Arizona Treasurer’s office has had a record of stable, safe management of Arizona’s investments. Right now, Arizona has an $11 billion Permanent Land Endowment Trust Fund (PLETF). Sixty percent of that money is in equities and 40 percent is in bonds or bond-equivalent. This mix is there to protect the state’s assets in the event of a market downturn. Nick Mansour’s key campaign pledge is that he wants to change that mix to 80 percent in equities and 20 percent in bonds or bond equivalents. This is essentially gambling with our state money that is meant to pay for education. It is a risk Arizona cannot take.

We are supporting Elijah Norton for State Treasurer — a businessman who built an Arizona-headquartered company from a thousand dollars into a global operation employing hundreds, and who has managed nine figures in claims reserves under strict investment guidelines for more than a decade.

We urge the people of Arizona to look at both records side by side, and to vote accordingly.

— Business Leaders Against Nick

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