Carlyle Gives David Rubenstein $13,000 a Day for Air Travel

When you are a deal making bankster, you have to stay on the move. WSJ reports:

Carlyle Group paid $4.75 million in 2010 for business-related flights made by David Rubenstein, the private-equity firm’s co-founder, according to Carlyle’s IPO documents.

That works out to roughly $13,000 a day in travel payouts– significantly more than the flight costs Carlyle incurred for its two other co-founders.

So what is Rubenstein doing?

We dug into Carlyle’s IPO filing and FAA flight records for details of Rubenstein’s travel habits. It turns out the 62-year-old Rubenstein has what the IPO filing calls an “exceptionally rigorous travel schedule.”

Rubenstein and Carlyle’s two other co-founders each owns private planes and absorb all the costs to maintain and operate those planes when they’re used for personal reasons, according to Carlyle’s IPO filing. When the co-founders fly their planes for business reasons, Carlyle says it pays market rates for associated costs of the trips.

This year, according to FAA records, the Gulfstream IV registered to Rubenstein made more than 100 flights from January to mid-June, when Rubenstein sold the plane. The travel included about a dozen round trips between Washington, where Carlyle is based, and the New York City area. More exotic stops included Abu Dhabi, Vail, Colo., Geneva, Helsinki, Guam and Sapporo, Japan. This week, Rubenstein was scheduled to appear at an investment conference in Hong Kong.

Rubenstein doesn’t seem to give himself much time for R&R, even on the long-haul flights or those to resort areas. According to the FAA data, for many of the flights Rubenstein’s plane departed within a day of arrival.