Bush forced to defend his business past ahead of speech on corporate America

On the eve of a keynote speech on cleaning up corporate America, President George Bush was forced last night to defend his own past business activities in the Texas oil industry.

He dismissed renewed questioning of his dealings in Harken Energy, where he was a director before entering politics, as "old news" and "old-style politics".

There was, he insisted, no comparison between those transactions, in which he sold Harken stock worth some $800,000 in 1990 shortly before the company issued adjusted figures that caused its share price to fall sharply, and the Enron, WorldCom and other scandals which have bruised market confidence.

Under insistent questioning at a White House news conference, President Bush declared that, "sometimes things aren't black and white when it comes to accounting procedures".

With barely suppressed anger, he rejected an implicit suggestion that his record disqualified him from preaching corporate reform. And he attacked Democrats for turning the issue into a political debate ahead of November's mid-term elections.

Turning to his keenly awaited speech on Wall Street today, the President said he would request a bigger budget and more investigators for the Securities and Exchange Commission, as part of a package to crack down on corporate abuse, protect pensions and restore investor confidence. He is also expected to call for jail terms for miscreant executives. But he insisted, these were a tiny minority. "It's the few that have created the stains that we must deal with," the President said.

On Iraq, Mr Bush said that the US would use "all tools at our disposal" to oust President Saddam Hussein.

"There's different ways to do it," he said. But he refused to comment on reports last week that a draft Pentagon plan for an invasion of Iraq envisioned a multi-pronged attack with tens of thousands of US marines and soldiers. He also dismissed as "hypothetical" a question on whether he wanted President Saddam removed before the end of his term at the White House.