NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - StreetLife Special: With all the renewed interest surrounding President Bush and his dealings with Harken Energy Corp. a decade or so ago, at least one intriguing question remains unanswered. We all know what became of George W. Bush, but what became of Harken?

Turns out that this now infamous oil and gas company, which as you may remember was in declining health when W. made his stock sale in 1990, is in even worse shape today. A little digging reveals a company that has lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the past half decade. Harken's stock, (ticker HEC-ASE) currently trades for just pennies. Its CEO, chief accounting officer, and CFO, all worked in the energy audit division of Arthur Andersen, the CFO as recently as the mid-90s. The COO was also an Andersen auditor. Continuing a practice that was in place when W. was in residence, the company made loans (and forgave at least one of them) to senior management and directors.

Now a tiny, highly leveraged company, Harken has dozens of operating subsidiaries and a tangle of financial statements. Despite the company's notoriety, it's hard to find anyone who follows Harken these days. "We dropped coverage [of Harken] two years ago," says Fadel Gheit, senior energy analyst at Fahnestock & Co. "Because you get sick and tired of 'the check is in the mail'. They promise but they don't deliver. You cannot have a company go to investors and tell them just go to the next well and then the next well is dry and then they say wait for the next one." The company did not return repeated calls for comment.

George W. Bush joined Harken's board in 1986 when Harken bought out an oil company that had recently purchased Bush Exploration. Bush reportedly bought Harken stock in 1986. Later in June of 1990 he made the fateful sale of 200,000 shares of Harken, pocketing $850,000, and neglecting to file a required form with the SEC until months later. Harken stock tanked from $4 to $2 before the year was out, which raised the question of whether Bush knew bad news was coming when he sold. Bush left the board of the company in 1993.

Harken, which is engaged in oil and gas exploration, development, and production in Texas and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in Colombia, Peru, Panama, and Costa Rica, soldiered on after Bush left. CEO Mikel Faulkner and COO Bruce Huff, CPAs who have been with the Harken since 1980 and 1990 respectively, pursued a variety of deals to jump-start its operations. But without much luck.

The company's Latin American operations in particular were a drag, and Harken lost some $263 million over the past five years. And in a complex series of transactions, Harken recently moved its South American operations into a British company called Global PLC, of which Harken owns 92 percent. "It was always suspected that something was fishy, but not because of the Bush connection," says Gheit of Fahnestock. "That for a small company like Harken to be involved in foreign drilling operations getting concessions from foreign governments, things just didn't add up. A lot of people had suspected that this was a CIA front." That particular point, of course, is just a rumor.

Here are more facts: In November 2000, with its stock in a nosedive, Harken did a 1-10 reverse stock split. This maneuver reduces the number of shares outstanding by a factor of ten and is intended to boost a company's stock price, which it did, for a while. Harken's stock popped up from 50 cents to $5.00, but then resumed its descent, falling to a recent low of 38 cents. (Note that unadjusted for the reverse split, Harken's stock would now be trading for 3.8 cents!) Harken, which once had a market capitalization of hundreds of millions of dollars, is now worth only $8 million. The company, which did $32 million in sales last year and posted a net loss of $41 million, has $64 million in long-term obligations, most of it in the form of convertible notes.

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For such a wheezing pipsqueak, Harken has attracted a surprising number of big names besides Bush. SEC documents show that in 1985, billionaire investor George Soros sold a company he controlled named Consolidated to Harken for stock and joined its board. He stayed until his stake was bought out by the company four years later. In the 1990s, Michael Huffington, former Republican Congressman from California and ex-spouse of Arianna, owned a company that was partner in a well with Harken in Columbia. And in 1999 an SEC filing shows that a group of financial entities tied to Wall Street big shot Geoffrey Boisi owned 5.4 percent of Harken's stock.

There's lots more here to be unraveled. Meanwhile in the White House, President Bush probably wishes Harken had either been bought, died, or just disappeared long ago.

Andrew Serwer is editor-at-large of Fortune magazine.

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