Rarely do private companies find themselves punished for using #shell #companies to move capital and avoid taxes.
The fine accountants at Ernst & Young cooked up a complicated scheme in 2008 for a restructuring of #Koch #Industries via shell entities in Luxembourg,
a notorious tax haven, with the reasonable expectation that the ruse would never be revealed.
But then someone leaked a raft of private documents from #Mossack #Fonseca, a law firm in Panama that specializes in the creation of shell companies.
The info dump became known as the #Panama #Papers, and among its many revelations was Koch Industries’ bid to reinvent parts of the company, on paper,
as tax-avoidant Luxembourg shell companies.
According to the Center for Public Integrity, the essence of the Koch Industries deal was to
“reorder the ownership of many subsidiaries and centralize them under Luxembourg companies that are all served by internal corporate finance companies,
akin to a company’s own bank.”
Maybe that’s where the Koch siblings got the idea to get behind #DonorsTrust
—a sort of house bank for the array of political entities and think tanks they fund.
Of course, as with all of the organizations funded by Koch, they’re not in it alone.
#Betsy and #Dick #DeVos helped fund DonorsTrust, according to Mother Jones.
And then there are the many Koch-network “pass-through” groups, such as "Freedom Partners"
and the "Center to Protect Patient Rights",
which function much the way that shell companies do in the world of private capital:
-- they add layers of obfuscation over the provenance of the dollars flowing from one right-wing organization or institution to the next.
For instance, there’s the #Wellspring #Committee,
a pass-through funded in part via the Koch network, whose director, Ann Corkery, also sat for six years on the board of the #Becket #Fund for #Religious #Liberty,
a pro-bono law firm, according to tax filings.
With its portfolio of so-called religious freedom cases,
the Becket Fund gained notice as the firm representing the principals of the #Hobby #Lobby company in
a 2014 Supreme Court challenge to a mandate in the Affordable Care Act
for employer-based health insurance to cover,
without a co-pay, the costs of prescription #contraception.
One type of private company is the “#closely #held” variety, which may occasionally trade stock publicly, but has only a few shareholders.
The Supreme Court’s decision in favor of Hobby Lobby (number 106 on the 2016 Forbes list of the nation’s top private companies) specifically cited its “closely held” status as a qualification for its exemption from the ACA contraceptive mandate.
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