Michael Bloomberg's campaign team has said he will sell his financial data company if elected president.
A spokesman for Bloomberg's campaign said that the company would be put in a blind trust, and then a trustee would handle the sale.
Bloomberg is seeking to put clear blue water between himself and presidential rival Donald Trump, who continues to run his company from the Oval office.
Bloomberg campaign manager Tim O’Brien told CNN: “Mike Bloomberg will release his tax returns. Mike Bloomberg will also sell Bloomberg LP. There will be no confusion about any of his financial holdings blurring the line between public service and personal profiteering. We will be 180 degrees away from where Donald Trump is on these issues, because Donald Trump is a walking financial conflict of interest.”
The issue of conflict of interest was brought to the fore in the early days of Bloomberg's race for the democratic nomination when news leaked that the company's journalists had been instructed not to probe Bloomberg of any of his democratic rivals, but instead to focus their investigative work on the Trump administration.
O’Brien told the Associated Press in a separate interview that the former New York mayor wouldn’t allow a sale to a foreign buyer or private equity firm.
Bloomberg launched the company bearing his name in 1981 and sold his first financial information system to Merrill Lynch. Best known for his proprietary financial data desktop machine, the company has since expanded into a global multimedia entity, employing more than 2,700 news professionals in 120 countries.
Currently, there are over 325,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscriptions worldwide, with a price tag of roughly $20,000 per desk.