Ryan Fazio’s biggest political achievement is a line on your electric bill. In 2023, he co-wrote a law that forced the power utilities to break the public benefits charge out as its own line item instead of burying it in the bigger number. Everything he’s done since runs on the juice that this win produced.
His argument for why he should be governor (and I mean this as a compliment) is that you have the right to see every charge and those in power who would rather you didn’t see it have something to answer for.
That brings me to a detail Hearst’s Ken Dixon reported last week. The annual ethics filings came out for the three candidates running for governor of Connecticut. Ned Lamont filed 113 pages and waived the confidentiality protections available. Josh Elliott filed 25 pages and also waived his confidentiality protections.
Ryan Fazio filed six pages and did not waive the confidentiality that state law applies by default. His campaign is all about itemization and he’s the only candidate who kept a section of his form sealed.
I spent some time looking into Chapter 10 of the state statutes trying to find out what that covers and the answer is narrow. Only two things on a Statement of Financial Interests are shielded: names of dependent children and names of creditors owed more than $10K. Lamont and Elliott each certified that they owe no debts over $10K, so their waivers opened empty envelopes. Fazio didn't check that box, which appears to mean he has a creditor list, and he’s the only one of the three who kept it sealed. The boring answer is that it's probably a mortgage, and it's probably right.
But the public benefits charge was also legal, also discoverable if you felt like excavating PURA filings in your free time. Fazio’s entire argument was that it wasn’t good enough, that the burden belongs on the official to show the line. I asked his campaign why he didn’t waive and they didn’t respond.
And there’s the question of what Fazio does for a living. Dixon and other media call him a financial advisor. Financial advisors who work with the public are registered with FINRA or the SEC and easy to find. When I ran his name through BrokerCheck and the SEC adviser database, nothing came up.
His LinkedIn doesn't answer it either. Where the employer field would normally hold a company's name, his says "Growth Equity Firm." The job before that is listed the same way: "Trading Houses."
His own filing names his employer as Services Capital. I found no record of it in any Connecticut registry or in any SEC or FINRA database. But the campaign finance records tell a different story. From 2018 to 2021 he listed COFCO International, a global commodities firm, matching the trading career from his public bio. From late 2021 through last year he listed MARCorp Financial LLC around a dozen times. Services Capital shows up just once, in an occupation field of a 2022 donation listing MARCorp as his employer.
Both firms are real and both are registered at the same suburban Chicago address. Illinois lists just one manager for MARCorp: Michael Fazio. The registered agent for both companies is Christian Fazio. Ryan Fazio’s father is named Michael. So is one of his brothers. Christian is another brother. Whichever Michael runs it, the employer Ryan Fazio has never publicly named appears to be a family firm.
Nothing is wrong with that, none of that is improper and no law made him reveal more than he did. But it took a little bit of digging to find out what a candidate for governor does for work. I asked his campaign about it. No response.
Until 1998, state officials had to disclose clients who paid them over $10K, the one question that will actually tell you if a politician has a conflict of interest. The legislature quietly got rid of it in 1997 and it never came back. Had that survived, this post would’ve been answered in Fazio’s filing.
Fazio has spent five years telling Connecticut voters that you need to start asking questions when a politician says “it’s legal” or “you could’ve looked it up.” And I completely agree with him.
I want to be clear: I don’t think there’s some huge scandal here. The sealed part is probably just his mortgage and the unnamed employer is probably a family firm. But it shouldn’t take two states and multiple databases to answer one of the most basic questions you could ask a candidate for governor.
Transparency