Crum's lack of diligence on investing $225 million
In early 2025, Revenue Commissioner Adam Crum personally selected three private infrastructure fund managers in which he wanted to invest $225 million in public funds. He did little research and did not consult experts available to the state revenue department.
Crum discussed his plan last summer with Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his staff, though there is disagreement on whether Dunleavy “directed” the plan, as claimed by Crum. It’s clear the governor and his staff failed to ask enough questions.
Crum first reached out to six investment companies in early 2025, saying that he knew of some of them through his work as a trustee of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. and his role with the Alaska Retirement Management Board.
It is important to understand that APFC trustees do not make investment decisions for the permanent fund.
After professional staffers in the revenue department learned of Crum’s plan, they “flagged concerns relating to two of the funds in which Mr. Crum intended to invest.” The revenue staff did not conduct due diligence on any of the three funds.
In June 2025, Crum gave a document to Dunleavy and his staff about a plan to invest CBR funds “in private infrastructure funds that would pay higher returns” than keeping the money in cash.
Crum created his own acronym for the project—ARTIC, meaning Alaska Resource Technology and Infrastructure Capital.
The goal was to “generate superior risk-adjusted performance while modernizing key sectors of our economy, such as traditional and digital infrastructure.” The document suggests that the companies would invest in Alaska and Outside.
It is also important to understand that while Dunleavy knew the plan, Crum concealed the details from legislative finance leaders, who asked him about this topic on May 19. He replied to them in late June without mentioning the $225 million plan he hoped to finish before quitting to run for governor.
Crum selected the three managers—planning to put $75 million with each firm—without reviewing the record of how their infrastructure funds did compared to similar funds managed by other companies. He didn’t look at what risks they took or analyze their liquidity. He did not conduct due diligence.
“Mr. Crum similarly did not conduct a comparative review of the selected investments against potential investments outside of the private equity asset class,” the independent investigation of Crum’s behavior by WilmerHale found.
To add to this lack of research, he hired an Outside law firm on March 17 to represent the Department of Revenue, intending to have the fund managers pay for the legal fees that would accrue when the law firm negotiated the investment contracts.
State law requires that the attorney general approve of legal contracts, but Crum did not follow that rule.
Crum claimed, in business school gibberish that smells like AI text, that the fund managers were selected as “the result of diligence designed to identify not just excellent managers, but a complementary set whose combined strengths create a balanced, synergistic portfolio. The managers were chosen for their institutional quality, strategic alignment with the CBRF (Constitutional Budget Reserve Fund) subaccount’s objectives, and differentiated approaches to value creation.”
WilmerHale redacted the names of the two companies that had their $75 million contracts stopped by Crum’s successor at the revenue department. According to information that was not redacted, one of them appears to be Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative investment manager. The other company appears to be I Squared Capital, founded by Morgan Stanley executives in 2012.
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