CHICAGO – The International Business Times thinks Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel a hypocrite.

The news site reports Emanuel is violating “much-touted” ethics reforms he vowed to uphold as mayor by allowing money from the city’s teachers pension fund to flow to financial companies under the control of his friends and top campaign donors.

Emanuel, who appoints board members to the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund, declined IBT’s request for comment, but Chicago aldermen Scott Waguespack, Bob Fioretti and John Arena said Emanuel’s “pay-to-play actions” have “violated the public trust and are a breach of the fiduciary duty,” according to a letter recently sent to Andrew Creaseney, director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division.

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“When Mayor Emanuel took office, he said he was going to stop the culture of pay-to-play,” Waguespack told the news site. “This is an example of his failure to follow through on those promises.”

IBT reports:

According to city documents obtained by IBTimes, the firm affiliated with Illinois’ Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner — a longtime friend of Chicago’s Democratic mayor — as well as executives at private-equity giant Madison Dearborn have gained substantial investments from the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund (CTPF) since Emanuel took office. The documents also show the CTPF has an indirect equity stake in Grosvenor Capital Management. Executives at the latter two firms have donated nearly $1.8 million to Emanuel’s campaign and political organizations since 2011.

The teachers’ pension money went to the donors’ firms even though the Chicago Teachers Union has become one of Emanuel’s most outspoken opponents after the mayor shuttered 50 schools across the city and proposed cutting public employees’ retirement benefits. SEC rules are designed to prohibit campaign contributions to city officials from executives at firms managing city pension money. Those rules are in addition to the executive order signed by Emanuel that purports to prohibit campaign donations from city contractors and subcontractors.

Waguespack, who was unsuccessfully targeted for defeat by Emanuel’s political action committee in March, told the news site the mayor’s troubles are important to consider heading into the April 7 mayoral run-off election with communist, union-backed Chuy Garcia.

“We need the ESC to really investigate these donations from the same people who are managing the city’s pension money,” he said.

The questionable pension investments “reinforce the need of Chicago to have a mayor who isn’t going to have the kind of conflicts that Mayor Emanuel has created over the last four years,” Waguespack said.

The companies involved with the pension investments, of course, contend they’re doing nothing wrong, though IBT reports several did not have any involvement with the teachers union pension fund prior to Emanuel taking office.

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Regardless, Jay Youngdahl, a fellow at the Institute for Responsible Investment at Harvard University, believes Emanuel’s apparent conflicts of interest are bad for Chicago.

“Pay-to-play practices unfortunately remain all too common in pension funds,” Youngdahl told IBT.

“It encourages a toxic milieu in which pension trustees may place their own interests or the interests of those who appointed them above the interests of the people whose healthy retirement depends on the funds. For an investment manager to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to a public official charged with appointing trustees to a fund, while at the same time providing investment services and soliciting business from a pension fund, is a clear red flag.”

IBT attempted to secure documents about investment holdings and other fee information about the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund, but were rejected by CTPF officials.

“In rejecting the request, CTPF officials cited a special exemption in the state’s open-records law that allows them to block the release of information about public investments in private financial firms,” the news site reports.

That exemption was created in a bill passed in 2005 at the urging of a trade group that counts at least two of the Emanuel-linked companies among its members.

“That legislation permits Illinois pension funds to choose whether to block the release of details about its investments. In previous IBTimes’ open-records requests, three of Chicago’s other pension funds did not cite the same exemption and released the relevant details. Only the CTPF chose to block the release of the information,” according to the news site.