His holdings in the family businesses were valued at a minimum of $5.1 million.
Leavitt was required to sell the assets because the department he now heads regulates the insurance industry and, through the Food and Drug Administration, the beef and dairy business.
"This is tough stuff," Rich McKeown, Leavitt's chief of staff, said Monday. "This is a decades-long enterprise with his family. And this is sometimes the price you pay for public service."
In a March 2 letter, Edgar Swindell, the ethics officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, notified the Office of Government Ethics that Leavitt had complied with the terms of an ethics arrangement that Leavitt had agreed to before his confirmation.
Swindell also praised Leavitt for selling his holdings, rather than recusing himself from certain decisions where there might be a conflict.
"His willingness to relinquish control over family enterprises with which there is a strong personal bond is to be commended," Swindell wrote. "Handling the situation in this manner goes beyond what many appointees would choose to do."
Stephen Potts, the former director of the Office of Government Ethics, said there have been high-ranking members of past administrations who didn't sell their interests in family businesses and instead recused themselves on a case-by-case basis, but it "would take a lot more police work to police that kind of arrangement."
The lion's share of Leavitt's transactions involve divesting his interest in The Leavitt Group, the family's insurance company. Plans to sell his share of the Leavitt Group were noted in the financial disclosure form that Cabinet nominees must file. That disclosure estimated the value of his insurance holdings at between $5 million and $25 million.
The Leavitt Group, founded in 1952 by Leavitt's father, former state Sen. Dixie Leavitt, consists of 69 insurance agencies with revenues of $72 million annually. It is the nation's 27th largest insurance company.
Leavitt's ethics agreement also required the governor to divest his ownership in Security Agriculture Enterprises Inc., which owns the family's dairy in Cedar City. His holdings in the company were valued at between $100,000 and $250,000.
Leavitt Land and Investment Inc. also agreed to sell off its cattle ranching interest, which could have presented a potential conflict of interest. If it had been unable to spin off its cattle ranching, Leavitt would have been required to sell his holdings in that company as well, valued at between $1 million and $5 million.
Potential conflicts could have arisen because the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of HHS, regulates animal feeds and medicines given to cattle.
"There are lots of people in this town and lots of people in public service generally . . . for whom it is a Herculean effort and sacrifice to adjust their entire estates, and I think this is one of those times," said McKeown. "He just said 'I'm not going to do it halfway. I'm going to do it all the way.' "
Until the divestment was completed, Leavitt worked closely with HHS ethics officers to assure his decisions did not create a conflict of interest.
Other secretaries have been forced into similar liquidations. Leavitt's predecessor at HHS, Tommy Thompson, had to sell off pharmaceutical stock after his nomination as secretary. Former Commerce Secretary Don Evans agreed to sell $38 million in stock in Eli Lilly & Co., where he had been a senior vice president, and Treasury Secretary John Snow sold stock and resigned from corporate boards.
