Given the current trajectory of the Trump administration, there are several White House officials who may find it expedient to 1) self-medicate with large amounts of alcohol and 2) tighten their purse strings. Among them, it seems, is Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who appeared to down “at least three glasses” of wine on Friday night at New York’s Polo Bar, and examined the check “fastidiously” before putting his card down, according to an observer who was on the scene. After a relatively gleeful few months in which the “King of Bankruptcy” took his fancy velvet slippers out for a night on the town; traveled with the president to Saudi Arabia where he was gifted with “two gigantic bushels of dates”; delighted in the “after-dinner entertainment” of bombing Syria; toasted the marriage of Steve Mnuchin and Louise Linton; and came up with the genius idea to throw a cocktail party to convince high-school students to work in factories, Ross’s happy days suddenly took a turn for the worse. Last month, over a period of a single week, it emerged that the former private-equity manager:

And now, at a time when his relationship with Donald Trump has apparently turned frosty, presumably owing to the fact that Ross is not as rich as he had claimed, he’s been accused of insider trading by European lawmakers. According to Mother Jones, last week in Brussels, a report about the 2008 eurozone banking crisis was presented to 52 European Parliament members. And unfortunately for Ross, one of its sections focused on his investment in the Bank of Ireland and the circumstances around which he was able to make a very large profit. According to the report’s authors, after amassing a 34.9 percent stake in the bank in July 2011, and subsequently becoming a board member, Ross became privy to information that the firm was using “deceptive accounting practices to mask its losses and embellish its financial position.” Based on that inside information, the allegation goes, Ross sold his holdings over a period of several months beginning in March 2014, ultimately netting a profit of roughly $682 million. A year later, both the bank’s auditor and chief financial officer testified that the bank had been engaging in shady accounting practices.

Predictably, following those revelations, Bank of Ireland’s share prices dropped precipitously, making the timing of Ross’s sale look all the more prescient (or, as the authors of the report suggest, illegal). Ross “had access to the loss details that Bank of Ireland kept hidden from retail shareholders,” the report says. “The profit that Mr. Ross accumulated was largely at their expense.” In a statement to Mother Jones, Luke “Ming” Flanagan, the politician who commissioned the report, charged that Ross’s profit was “money lost to the Irish people.” He also suggested that not only did Ross become aware of the accounting practices while sitting on the board, but he may have known about them before he purchased the shares, and leveraged that information to buy them on preferential terms.

Regardless of whether or not W.L. Ross & Co.’s due diligence uncovered the the situation before acquiring the stake or as a board member after, the situation doesn’t look great for the commerce secretary. “Even if it’s a gray area, the very fact that there is a potential serious accounting problem generally has to be disclosed,” Lawrence Harris, a former chief S.E.C. economist, told Mother Jones. “If he was trading on material information that should have been disclosed but wasn’t, that’s pretty close to the technical definition of insider trading.” In a statement to The Hive, Ross called the report a “factually incorrect effort to smear me.” The commerce secretary will presumably be downing a pallet of wine over the next few days, though probably not the good stuff, as he may be economizing.