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.

The wealth of #Betsy #DeVos,
by contrast, comes from a simpler operation:
the marketing of what some have called a pyramid scheme that goes by the brand name #Amway.

Founded by her father-in-law in 1959, Amway distributes home products like dish soap and cosmetics through a network of home-based sellers
who are pressured to recruit more sellers in order to earn a bonus on the amount of product the distributor would then sell wholesale to the recruit.
That recruit would also be a distributor, looking for recruits of his or her own, in order to sell more products wholesale in order to get that bonus.

Note the emphasis on recruitment and bonuses rather than the direct-selling to retail customers,
who, in the end, were the ones for whom Amway products were ostensibly intended.

In the business press, Amway is often described as a “multilevel marketing company.”

In the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission described its business model as
an “inherent fraud,” as historian Rick Perlstein reported in The Nation,
and tried to shut the company down.
The FTC failed in that effort, but did issue orders in 1979 slapping Amway for price-fixing and misrepresenting the kind of money distributors could expect to make.
In fact, Amway was made to tell distributors that they could wind up losing money.

Three decades later, in 2010, a class action lawsuit by former sellers (um, “distributors”) alleging Amway’s engagement in an “illegal scheme” was settled out of court.

According to USA Today, Amway agreed to pay $55 million to former distributors,
closely oversee high-level distributors who run training businesses,
strengthen refund policies
and make other changes estimated to cost an additional $100 million.

In Forbes’ 2016 listing of “America’s Largest Private Companies,” Amway clocks in at number twenty-nine.

The education secretary, née Elisabeth Prince, did not come into the DeVos family empty-handed.
Her own family of origin, while not as wealthy as her husband’s, was quite well-to-do through her father’s enterprise, 💥Prince Corporation💥, itself a privately held company until Johnson Controls bought it for $1.3 billion in cash in 1996.

Founder #Edgar #Prince, seeking to change the political culture to more closely resemble his own heartless Calvinism,
donated, according to Zack Stanton of Politico, “millions in seed funding to launch the
💥Family Research Council,”
the right-wing organization that represents and organizes politically conservative evangelical Christians,
and was famously designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Prince’s son, #Erik, used his windfall to found #Blackwater, the military contractor that went on to infamy when, in 2007,
its mercenaries gunned down civilians in a Baghdad city square.
Four Blackwater contractors were convicted in 2014 of killing fourteen unarmed Iraqis “in what prosecutors called a wartime atrocity,” according to the New York Times.
Blackwater, since sold and renamed #Academi, was also privately held.
It enjoyed more than $1 billion in government contracts.
In 2010, according to the Washington Post,

Prince moved to the United Arab Emirates “amid mounting legal problems for his American business.”

Both the #Mercers and the #DeVoses pour millions into the political system.
You can bet they plan to run the country the same way they have run their companies: using shell games and pyramid schemes, fraud and shakedown.

According to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, #Robert #Mercer “gave $22.5 million in disclosed donations to Republican candidates and to political-action committees” to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
And that doesn’t include possible donations to nonprofit advocacy groups, now allowed,
since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC,
to conduct advertising for and against political candidates.

But unlike PACs, these nonprofits
—classified as “social welfare” groups
—are not required to disclose their donors.

Politico’s Stanton reports that Betsy and Dick DeVos pretty much own Michigan politics,
having spent “at least $100 million on political campaigns and causes over the past 20 years.”
The DeVoses used political giving and influence to cut funding to public schools and pave the way for a large influx of charter schools,
and to see Michigan, home to the once-mighty United Auto Workers,
turned into a so-called right-to-work state,
an anti-union designation that translates into greater workplace control for business bosses, but few rights for the bossed