NEW YORK — New York City mayoral front-runner Andrew Cuomo is pledging to recuse himself, if elected, from potential conflicts of interest stemming from his recent legal consulting business.
Yet he refuses to disclose his clients — making his guarantee impossible to verify.
As the former governor seeks to take over a City Hall beset by corruption scandals, he is effectively setting up an honor system on his promise to avoid conflicts of interest that could arise if his clients at Innovation Strategies have business before the administration.
“This is simple: Candidate Cuomo should disclose who his clients were and say how he will recuse himself should he win,” Susan Lerner, head of Common Cause New York, said.
As mayor, Cuomo would run a sprawling city government that doles out billions of dollars’ worth of contracts and regulates business and real estate activity — potentially posing opportunities for him to interact with prior patrons who, collectively, paid him a handsome sum.
In 2024, Cuomo reported making more than $500,000 from the firm, the highest income bracket tracked by the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board.
The board does not require candidates to disclose individual clients. But knowing who paid him, Lerner said, would provide insight into whether any former business associates were benefiting from government action and would show the electorate he has nothing to hide. Former Comptroller Scott Stringer, for instance, released a list of lobbying and consulting clients to POLITICO after jumping into the Democratic primary.
Cuomo’s camp declined to do the same.
“Since he left office, among other activities, Governor Cuomo has been engaged in private practice, providing legal services, representing individuals and corporations in a variety of matters, and does not comment on those private client matters,” spokesperson Richard Azzopardi said in a statement. “He has not represented clients before a New York city or state agency.”
If Cuomo were to become mayor, Azzopardi said he would work with the conflicts board on any issues that might arise. Specifically, Cuomo’s team said he would give a list of his former clients to the board, which would determine if there was a conflict for any particular government action. If so, Cuomo would recuse himself from that decision and disclose his recusal.
While an attorney from the board did not address Cuomo’s specific situation, she said monitoring a list of former clients who worked with a city official would not be within its purview or even possible with its current resources. The board is primarily concerned with an official’s outside relationships while in office. The board does, however, dole out advice to any official who asks for guidance.
The question of how to handle former legal clients is reminiscent of Mayor Eric Adams’ first chief of staff, a Brooklyn attorney who divested from his former law firm upon shifting to government work. At the time, Frank Carone’s pledge to recuse himself from matters that involved former clients drew criticism from ethics experts, who called for a more standardized process laid out in writing. A POLITICO review found several of his former patrons had business before city government while Carone held a position of power. While Cuomo’s pledge is equally impossible to verify, his pledge to provide the COIB with a client list goes beyond what Carone instituted.
Cuomo’s refusal to come clean about his clients contains a hint of irony: More than a decade ago as governor, he pushed state officials to disclose their private clients in the name of government accountability.
In 2011, he signed an ethics package that pushed for Albany lawmakers to publicly list clients with business before the state. Four years later, he pushed to expand those disclosure rules and limit exemptions based on attorney-client privilege.
“This new level of disclosure and transparency will go a long way towards restoring the public trust,” Cuomo said after the passage of the 2015 ethics laws. “The more trust, the more credibility.”
The circumstances in City Hall are slightly different: While state legislators are allowed to earn outside income while holding office, mayors are not — though they are subject to term limits that often land them back in the private sector.
Regardless, an elected official who was in office at the time of the Albany ethics reforms said the spirit is the same.
“It appears in his history he was supportive of this for others. I think he should support it for himself,” said state Sen. Liz Krueger.
Reinvent Albany, a government reform organization, said disclosing other information such as the types of clients Cuomo represented and any municipal business they had would help shed light on the issue, even if he refuses to name the companies or individuals themselves.
Bloomberg News, for example, reported Cuomo did legal work for a cryptocurrency exchange that was facing a federal probe — a rare peek into his post-government activities.
“City Hall has been wracked by enormous pay-to-play scandals,” said John Kaehny, Reinvent Albany’s executive director. “Seems reasonable to ask the front-runner to reveal what industries he’s been consulting for and how much they’ve been paying him.”