Raymond Chan spent his time as Deputy Mayor in charge of economic development in 2016-2017, shaking down developers. It's almost like these regulatory & approval processes were designed to help Swamp creatures get rich.
This time they were shaking down Chinese developers who were willing to pay bribes to get their projects approved.
138 page indictment is available here. This is the unsealing of a superceding indictment. Which likely means there are other connected cases that are not being unsealed & will be indicted separately. justice.gov/usao-cdca/pres…
FBI has been draining the Swamp in Los Angeles for several years with investigations going back a long time.
Raids on not only city hall but the LA water authority were conducted by the FBI as they sought out corruption throughout the city government. threadreaderapp.com/thread/1153408…
They also raided the homes of several of the corrupt officials.
Press release says he laundered the cash into FLorida businesses that he owned. A quick search found these entities listed... search.sunbiz.org/Inquiry/Corpor…
Seems D'Amato took a cut of $45M on $160M being laundered through his businesses, passing on the rest to others not identified in the indictment. But at least some of it was used on behalf of Venezuelan officials, wonder if this was some of the cash donated to US politicians?
Huge victory for the IRS over Coca Cola in case of off shoring IP ownership & transferring profit out of the US to the divisions owning the intellectual property to avoid US taxes on the profits. Coke now owes $3.4B in taxes for Coke! #ButNothingsHappening news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-repo…
This is a common tax avoidance scheme, internally the company awards the intellectual property rights to a foreign division of the company. Then the US divisions pay royalties or profit shares to that foreign division, lowering their profits in the US.
It is a very common scheme.
Just as important, the IRS got a ruling that a Coca Cola friendly agreement with the IRS in 1996 covering prior years, does not bind the IRS to accepting the accounting formulas for every years since 1996. They avoided $3.4B in taxes they avoided by using that scheme...
There is one main problem with this idea, too many of the Democrat base has been taught that not loving our country is the morally superior position. They stopped loving America long before Trump came along. Trump is just exposing this hypocrisy with his America First rhetoric.
When Reagan tied together patriotism & America's success, many Democratic Party voters were not yet anti-American. Some were there, but patriotic rhetoric from Reagan in the 80s called to many Democrat voters & won them over for his 1984 landslide.
Since that time, Dems have focused very hard on convincing their voters that a successful America is not the solution to their problems; but that America's success is a threat to them. That they are not part of America & will miss out on the fruits of American success.
Chicago State U professor indicted for stealing $650k from 2011-2016 that was supposed to be funding minority representation in the pharma industry? Was it really meant to do that? Or was it just a slush fund disguised as a student group? #ButNothingsHappening
There must have been a lot of money going through this student association (funded by Big Pharma I presume...)
Apparently she headed this group from 2004 and the began attempting to wrestle control of it from her in 2014 leading to law suits by the association which is the Student National Pharmaceutical Association. chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/…
PA Supreme Court rules 5-2 that not allowing election observers to observe the election doesn't violate Pennsylvania election laws.
But 3 of those 5: Donohue, Dogherty & Wecht were all elected in 2015 while Dems were stuffing ballot boxes in Philly. assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7330…
This isn't conjecture, election judge Domenick J. Demuro plead guilty to stuffing ballot boxes with votes for cash & then adjusting voting records to account for the extra votes in 2014, 2015 & 2016 for Democrats in judicial races. #ButNothingsHappening
Interesting, we were talking about Brand & Zhao in May of 2019 but their case stayed below the radar...
Zhao was also paying for Harvard fencing team members to travel to China w his sons. Possibly giving Chinese intel a chance to gather info on them. #ButNothingsHappening
Zhao founded a telecom company to connect China & the US (I'm sure there was no spying going on there)!
He also played a role in getting Chinese involvement with the NBA using then NBA player Yao Ming & his foundations involved...