Oligarchy: Ghislaine Maxwell explains LLC rot; America loses zeal for foreign bribe-paying prosecutions
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LLCs – THAT’S A FOUR-LETTER WORD
In the months before Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest, there was much tabloid speculation about how it could be that she was so successfully evading arrest, on grand jury charges, of helping sex offender Jeffrey Epstein groom his underage victims. She was hiding out in Paris. Or was it Israel? Or perhaps she was on a submarine? After all, the reasoning went, if she was in the United States, agents would have found her already.
The truth turned out to be far more mundane, and far more depressing. She was living quietly in her New Hampshire house, her ownership of which was disguised by that indispensable tool of the modern criminal — a shell company.
- “The defendant appears to have been hiding on a 156-acre property acquired in an all-cash purchase in December 2019 (through a carefully anonymized LLC) in Bradford, New Hampshire,” the US attorney stated in her detention memorandum. (Italics mine)
The LLC, an abbreviation of the words Limited Liability Company, was invented in Wyoming in 1977. LLCs gave their owners a “best of both worlds” solution, by combining the positive attributes of partnerships and corporations into one single package. With an LLC, you could dodge taxes when things went right, and responsibility when things went wrong, so it’s pretty easy to understand why investors wanted them, and why governments did not. Up to 1977, you could only find such weird hybrids somewhere dodgy, like Panama.