Joe Biden Dealings with MBNA Bank (Real Estate)

At least by Senate standards, Mr. Biden does not have to try too hard to underscore his relative lack of wealth. He has long shouldered a heavy debt load; he obtained or refinanced mortgages 29 times since he was elected in 1972, and currently owes $730,000 on two mortgages on his home. In addition, he has had several personal loans, including one for up to $50,000 secured by the cash value of six life insurance policies.

Mr. Biden supplements his $165,000 Senate salary with a stipend from teaching a college course. His biggest boost came a few years ago, when he collected $225,000 in advances for his best-selling memoir. The Bidens have several checking accounts with less than $15,000 each, and Jill Biden’s retirement fund with between $15,000 to $50,000, according to their tax returns and Mr. Biden’s Senate financial disclosure reports. The couple reported virtually no investment income last year, and their largest asset by far was their home.

Mr. Biden previously lived for 21 years in a 10,000-square-foot former DuPont mansion in Greenville, which he bought in 1975 for $185,000 after learning it was slated for demolition.

After extensive renovations, he sold it in February 1996, through word of mouth, to John R. Cochran III, the vice chairman of MBNA, one of the nation’s largest credit card companies. He agreed to pay Mr. Biden’s full asking price, $1.2 million. MBNA reimbursed Mr. Cochran for a loss he took on the sale of his old home, according to a 1997 securities filing, which said the company requested that he move to Delaware from Maryland.

Mr. Cochran, who still lives at the house, could not be reached for comment.

The real estate deal was just one facet of a close relationship between Mr. Biden and MBNA, which donated more than $200,000 to his campaigns. The Delaware-based company gave a job to Mr. Biden’s son Hunter; flew Senator Biden and his wife to the Maine coast, where Mr. Biden spoke at a company retreat; and its former chief executive, Charles M. Cawley, donated at least $22,500 to a nonprofit breast cancer fund started by Jill Biden.

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MBNA also was an aggressive advocate of bankruptcy reform legislation before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Mr. Biden was a senior member and its former chairman. The legislation would make it harder for consumers to escape credit card debts.

Mr. Wade said there was nothing improper in Mr. Biden’s dealings with Mr. Cochran. He said the sale price was supported by an appraisal for the same amount, and that Mr. Biden never did MBNA any favors in the Senate.

In acquiring a site for his new house, Mr. Biden bought the lakeside parcel in Wilmington in March 1996 from Keith D. Stoltz, a real estate executive who once lived adjacent to the property and sold it to the senator for $350,000, the same price he paid for it five years earlier. In an e-mail message, Mr. Stoltz said the price was reasonable because the real estate market was soft and he had paid a premium for the lot so he could keep it undeveloped.

“Joe initially offered me $300,000 for the lot and I declined his offer,” he said.

Mr. Stoltz and several of his relatives have since given a total of about $33,000 in campaign donations to Mr. Biden over the years. He said the senator has never done anything “either formally or informally” to help his company.

To build his house, Mr. Biden turned to Beneficial National Bank. Its executives were active in state politics in Delaware, major campaign contributors to both parties nationally and advocates of changes to bankruptcy policy.

Not long before Mr. Biden obtained his construction loan from Beneficial in July 1997, he had offered to nominate the bank’s chairman, James H. Gilliam Jr., for a federal judge’s post in Delaware, according to news accounts of Mr. Gilliam’s death in 2003. Mr. Gilliam, a lawyer who also headed a state judiciary nomination panel and donated to Mr. Biden’s campaigns, declined the offer and recommended someone else, whom Mr. Biden nominated in June 1997.

Mr. Biden’s campaign said that his dealings with Mr. Gilliam had nothing to do with the $634,000 in loans he received from Beneficial, adding that Mr. Biden had other reasons to consider Mr. Gilliam, who would have been Delaware’s first African-American federal judge.

Mr. Biden, who said in his book that he designed his house “from the ground up,” saw it finished it time to move in for Christmas 1998, although the work of maintaining it never seemed complete. Recounting how he was once interrupted by a presidential phone call while he was outside watering newly planted cypress trees, he lamented that “even after a few years on the property, there was still landscaping to be done.”