State Senator Cleary reprimanded, fined by ethics committee

S.C. Sen. Ray Cleary, R-Murrells Inlet, has been publicly reprimanded and ordered to remit thousands of dollars in connection with six charges from the South Carolina Senate Ethics Committee.

Fines levied against Cleary amount to $41,900 and must be paid by Dec. 1. He was further ordered to remit $47,831 into his campaign account, and send $7,500 to the Children’s Trust Fund of South Carolina.

In a phone call with The Sun News, Cleary said an employee was completing his financial disclosure forms. He said nothing in the charges indicates he was engaged in fraud.

“I didn’t mismanage the [campaign] account,” Cleary said. “By this time I’m ready to move on. I had somebody doing the books. I thought it was being done correctly.”

The charges against Cleary, listed in a release from the ethics committee, suggest that on several occasions, money flowed from campaign coffers to the state senator without proper documentation. The committee states that he improperly reimbursed his campaign in 2015 for an international trip that never happened. Cleary said it did happen, and said he was the only one of 17 lawmakers to be singled out for an ethics charge.

The charges also alleged that Cleary misrepresented campaign expenditures nine times from January 2013 to December 2015; that he failed to report six campaign expenses, four of which were paid to himself; that Cleary reimbursed himself a total of $6,950 in “unsubstantiated” expenses; that he made six payments to credit card companies with campaign funds in 2015; and that over $13,000 in campaign contributions went unreported from 2013 to 2015.

Cleary said in October 2015 that he would not run for a fourth term. He maintained that the ethics fines stemmed from bookkeeping errors and poor documentation, not from actual misuse of campaign funds.

“Not one penny of my campaign account went to personal expenses,” Cleary said. “Did I keep the proper documentation? If I didn’t, that’s my fault.”

The state senator is also liable for the legal fees incurred in the investigation, totaling $27,415.

This story was originally published October 31, 2016 at 1:56 PM with the headline "State Senator Cleary reprimanded, fined by ethics committee."