Top GOP campaign donors charged with $550 million fraud
Two Texas businessmen, Charles Wyly Jr. and Samuel Wyly, are being accused of massive fraud by the Securities and Exchange commission. You can read the SEC complaint here, but the short version is the brothers are accused of funneling some $750 million worth of stock in four companies the two owned through a byzantine series of companies and accounts in the Cayman Islands and Isle of Man. They are also charged with an insider trading violation that is said to earned them $32 million. In total, they are alleged to have reaped $550 million in profits.
As it happens, the Wylys are some of the top Republican donors in the country, according to the Center for Responsive Politics:
Together with their wives, the Wyly brothers have donated nearly $2.5 million to Republican candidates and committees during the past 20 years, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals.
There's a couple more paragraphs of the article at the link.
But really, all this shows is that a couple of rich guys who didn't want to pay taxes used some creative accounting to get around it. It may very well be that they were just doing what John Kerry was doing with his yacht - perfectly legal stuff, which is now deemed to be illegal, or unethical, because it's depriving states of the taxes they want.
We'll find out.
THe main issue, of course, is that it's Republican donors doing this - not Republican politicians.
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