Post by anenro on Dec 23, 2019 14:48:34 GMT 4
A church, its shell companies and a plan to have rapper Flo Rida plug high-end bubbly
The middleman was ecstatic. An American archbishop was not only looking to move some money offshore, he was looking to move all his finances abroad.
“He says he feels he can swing his council or synod to establishing his whole banking empire as he envisions it and he wants to set up also an insurance company, various offshore companies,” wrote Michael O’Mara in a Sept. 8. 2015, email to a London-based offshore services provider. “I am trying also to sell him some of the recent companies you sent me with bank accounts to act as his holding companies.”
It’s not every day that a church, enjoying tax-exempt status in the United States, is seen as a viable candidate to buy offshore shell companies with their own bank accounts, which can give the appearance of a longstanding business.
The COO of one of those church-affiliated offshore businesses at one time had reached out to none other than Flo Rida, the Miami-born rap artist, trying to swing a deal to have him invest in a brand of high-end champagne called Billionaires Row. Flo Rida’s lawyer said no and the plan fizzled. But more on that in a bit.
The email about the archbishop’s offshore shell companies is part of a giant leak of more than a million documents from Formations House, a London-based financial services firm with clients across the globe, including some in the United States.
Other leaked documents show that Archbishop Timothy Paul, the senior pastor of the Christian Cathedral in Springfield, Mass., purchased an official-looking insurance company, a Swedish investment trust and even a faux bank — one in name only — in Gambia.
In interviews, he acknowledged spending tens of thousands of church dollars on offshore companies — but says he never used the shell companies.
Emails show O’Mara, who works out of an English seaside hotel room on behalf of Mediterranean Corporate Services, tried to sell the archbishop on religious-sounding names for his offshore entities — names like Alliance Parish Banking Ltd. or Alliance Congregational Bank & Trust Co.
But the archbishop settled on Dominion Global Investment Capital Trust, serving as its president and taking the name, he said, from the book of Genesis.
Dominion Global had a COO, William Benson, a brash New Yorker with a love of the limelight and a trail of unhappy business associates. They describe Benson as a frequent name-dropper, who boasted of his relationship with an archbishop, with Flo Rida and with the socialite Paris Hilton.
Dominion Global wasn’t a bank of the conventional sort, with checking accounts, tellers and the like. Nor did it grant commercial loans to real-estate developers.
When McClatchy and the Miami Herald called to check its operational hours, the call was put through to a man with a thick New York accent who said it wasn’t “that kind of bank.” Anyways, he said, the bank itself is in London.
When a reporter visited the bank’s listed address in lower Manhattan, in a swank high-rise glass tower at 17 State Street, Suite 4000, on the Hudson River, that suite wasn’t an actual bank either.
The guard there pulled out clipped-together paperwork listing hundreds of companies that together share the suite’s office space under a flat monthly fee.
Two young women answer the phones, the guard offered, but there isn’t anyone else there. It was a virtual office, a fancy address that gives the aura of a real brick-and-mortar company.
PIERCING THE VEIL
The archbishop’s offshore business was among the intriguing narratives found in 10 years worth of Formations House records obtained by the anti-secrecy group Distributed Denial of Secrets and shared with investigative journalists, including those at McClatchy and the Miami Herald..
Journalists collaborated for months and on Dec. 4 began publishing under the #29Leaks hashtag, a reference to Formation House’s tony address at 29 Harley Street in London. Reporters found Iranian oil companies dodging sanctions, a Miami resident busted in a DEA sting and a plan for industrial scale cannabis farming in Cameroon.
Formations House chief Charlotte Pawar said in emailed responses to questions that the leaked records were stolen and that she was subjected to extortion but did not provide evidence of that.
The leak, combined with the recent Panama Papers and Paradise Papers leaks, gives added momentum to legislation now in the U.S. Senate that would end anonymity by requiring greater disclosure of the true ownership of shell companies in the United States.
“99.99 percent of Americans don’t own offshore companies but the few that do try to tell you how legitimate it is,” said Edward H. Davis Jr., an asset-recovery lawyer with Sequor Law in Miami. “The reality is the entire offshore system is designed to avoid detection of the existence and movement of wealth.”
The Formations House leak adds a new wrinkle to the global debate, in part because it was based in London, not Panama or the faraway Seychelles, another haven for companies seeking tax avoidance. And it went beyond offering shell companies, but also faux banks that mimicked financial institutions but weren’t regulated or required to have a minimum amount of cash on hand.
These bank-named shells can issue loans, mortgages to their members and even credit cards as if they were a normal bank, according to promotional materials.
The Formations House documents provide insight into how these financial instruments are used. One email referenced a giant global gemstone wholesaler “sitting on a huge pile”, who sought three “banks” for internal operations, insisting on the humorous names Tightwad International Bank Ltd., Tightwad Bank International Co. Ltd. and Tightwad Global Bank Ltd.
SHELL COMPANIES FOR GOD
Archbishop Paul is not an archbishop in the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church, the common associations with that rank of clergy. Paul said that 20 years ago he adopted the name of St. Paul when he was consecrated as an archbishop.
He leads a freestanding Christian denomination that voted him archbishop and patriarch of the International Holy Communion of Churches, which he said involves roughly 700 churches that together count 4.6 million followers. Like the Russian or Greek orthodox churches, he said, the denomination follows the original interpretations of the early apostles.
“We brought orthodoxy to African Americans,” he explained.
Until recently, Paul was also president of Epiphany Development Corp., which converted a historic Springfield building into a Holiday Inn Express.
Paul, 53, insisted there was nothing untoward about his church having offshore companies.
“We wanted to fund missions and do things,” he said, noting he hoped to expand the reach of his church. “They sell offshore banks, so we thought this was a legitimate means to have an offshore bank for our ministries that we were going to be project-funding for.”
The interest in going offshore began with an email solicitation, he said, and eventually the representative from Mediterranean Corporate Services came across the Atlantic to see him.
Paul said he has foreign outreach in Gambia, India, Kenya and Zambia. His church website makes no mention of this. Asked about specific projects, he offered that the Swedish investment trust was established for that purpose but has yet to invest in projects.
“That would be for the real-estate projects we’re going to do,” he said, suggesting they were raising capital to build a foreign supermarket. “It’s almost like a real-estate trust.”
The Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, a #29Leaks partner, reported that Russian middlemen and Swedish offshore services providers had discovered and exploited a loophole in Sweden’s banking laws that gave the appearance that bank-named trusts were regulated when in fact those belonging to non-Swedes are not.
Swedish documents shared with McClatchy and the Miami Herald show Paul signing the trust registration on Feb. 20, 2017. He said he used another consultant called Global Money Consultants to create that company.
Paul also purchased a “bank” in Gambia, the smallest country on the African mainland but one with a large corruption problem, for years run by dictator Yahya Jammeh.
Formations House chief Charlotte Pawar’s late father, Nadeem Khan, had convinced Jammeh to create an enterprise zone, which allowed the London firm to fashion a line of business registering offshore companies there.
In an email to #29Leaks partners, O’Mara said he’d created more than 150 such banks in the Gambian offshore zone since 2013 for “wealthy families who want to handle their own finances.” The church doesn’t fit that description but O’Mara declined to discuss Paul’s offshore entities. Even though the Gambian enterprise zone was never fully authorized by the legislature there, banks sold for about $33,000 apiece today’s exchange rates, a price Paul didn’t dispute.
The middleman was ecstatic. An American archbishop was not only looking to move some money offshore, he was looking to move all his finances abroad.
“He says he feels he can swing his council or synod to establishing his whole banking empire as he envisions it and he wants to set up also an insurance company, various offshore companies,” wrote Michael O’Mara in a Sept. 8. 2015, email to a London-based offshore services provider. “I am trying also to sell him some of the recent companies you sent me with bank accounts to act as his holding companies.”
It’s not every day that a church, enjoying tax-exempt status in the United States, is seen as a viable candidate to buy offshore shell companies with their own bank accounts, which can give the appearance of a longstanding business.
The COO of one of those church-affiliated offshore businesses at one time had reached out to none other than Flo Rida, the Miami-born rap artist, trying to swing a deal to have him invest in a brand of high-end champagne called Billionaires Row. Flo Rida’s lawyer said no and the plan fizzled. But more on that in a bit.
The email about the archbishop’s offshore shell companies is part of a giant leak of more than a million documents from Formations House, a London-based financial services firm with clients across the globe, including some in the United States.
Other leaked documents show that Archbishop Timothy Paul, the senior pastor of the Christian Cathedral in Springfield, Mass., purchased an official-looking insurance company, a Swedish investment trust and even a faux bank — one in name only — in Gambia.
In interviews, he acknowledged spending tens of thousands of church dollars on offshore companies — but says he never used the shell companies.
Emails show O’Mara, who works out of an English seaside hotel room on behalf of Mediterranean Corporate Services, tried to sell the archbishop on religious-sounding names for his offshore entities — names like Alliance Parish Banking Ltd. or Alliance Congregational Bank & Trust Co.
But the archbishop settled on Dominion Global Investment Capital Trust, serving as its president and taking the name, he said, from the book of Genesis.
Dominion Global had a COO, William Benson, a brash New Yorker with a love of the limelight and a trail of unhappy business associates. They describe Benson as a frequent name-dropper, who boasted of his relationship with an archbishop, with Flo Rida and with the socialite Paris Hilton.
Dominion Global wasn’t a bank of the conventional sort, with checking accounts, tellers and the like. Nor did it grant commercial loans to real-estate developers.
When McClatchy and the Miami Herald called to check its operational hours, the call was put through to a man with a thick New York accent who said it wasn’t “that kind of bank.” Anyways, he said, the bank itself is in London.
When a reporter visited the bank’s listed address in lower Manhattan, in a swank high-rise glass tower at 17 State Street, Suite 4000, on the Hudson River, that suite wasn’t an actual bank either.
The guard there pulled out clipped-together paperwork listing hundreds of companies that together share the suite’s office space under a flat monthly fee.
Two young women answer the phones, the guard offered, but there isn’t anyone else there. It was a virtual office, a fancy address that gives the aura of a real brick-and-mortar company.
PIERCING THE VEIL
The archbishop’s offshore business was among the intriguing narratives found in 10 years worth of Formations House records obtained by the anti-secrecy group Distributed Denial of Secrets and shared with investigative journalists, including those at McClatchy and the Miami Herald..
Journalists collaborated for months and on Dec. 4 began publishing under the #29Leaks hashtag, a reference to Formation House’s tony address at 29 Harley Street in London. Reporters found Iranian oil companies dodging sanctions, a Miami resident busted in a DEA sting and a plan for industrial scale cannabis farming in Cameroon.
Formations House chief Charlotte Pawar said in emailed responses to questions that the leaked records were stolen and that she was subjected to extortion but did not provide evidence of that.
The leak, combined with the recent Panama Papers and Paradise Papers leaks, gives added momentum to legislation now in the U.S. Senate that would end anonymity by requiring greater disclosure of the true ownership of shell companies in the United States.
“99.99 percent of Americans don’t own offshore companies but the few that do try to tell you how legitimate it is,” said Edward H. Davis Jr., an asset-recovery lawyer with Sequor Law in Miami. “The reality is the entire offshore system is designed to avoid detection of the existence and movement of wealth.”
The Formations House leak adds a new wrinkle to the global debate, in part because it was based in London, not Panama or the faraway Seychelles, another haven for companies seeking tax avoidance. And it went beyond offering shell companies, but also faux banks that mimicked financial institutions but weren’t regulated or required to have a minimum amount of cash on hand.
These bank-named shells can issue loans, mortgages to their members and even credit cards as if they were a normal bank, according to promotional materials.
The Formations House documents provide insight into how these financial instruments are used. One email referenced a giant global gemstone wholesaler “sitting on a huge pile”, who sought three “banks” for internal operations, insisting on the humorous names Tightwad International Bank Ltd., Tightwad Bank International Co. Ltd. and Tightwad Global Bank Ltd.
SHELL COMPANIES FOR GOD
Archbishop Paul is not an archbishop in the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church, the common associations with that rank of clergy. Paul said that 20 years ago he adopted the name of St. Paul when he was consecrated as an archbishop.
He leads a freestanding Christian denomination that voted him archbishop and patriarch of the International Holy Communion of Churches, which he said involves roughly 700 churches that together count 4.6 million followers. Like the Russian or Greek orthodox churches, he said, the denomination follows the original interpretations of the early apostles.
“We brought orthodoxy to African Americans,” he explained.
Until recently, Paul was also president of Epiphany Development Corp., which converted a historic Springfield building into a Holiday Inn Express.
Paul, 53, insisted there was nothing untoward about his church having offshore companies.
“We wanted to fund missions and do things,” he said, noting he hoped to expand the reach of his church. “They sell offshore banks, so we thought this was a legitimate means to have an offshore bank for our ministries that we were going to be project-funding for.”
The interest in going offshore began with an email solicitation, he said, and eventually the representative from Mediterranean Corporate Services came across the Atlantic to see him.
Paul said he has foreign outreach in Gambia, India, Kenya and Zambia. His church website makes no mention of this. Asked about specific projects, he offered that the Swedish investment trust was established for that purpose but has yet to invest in projects.
“That would be for the real-estate projects we’re going to do,” he said, suggesting they were raising capital to build a foreign supermarket. “It’s almost like a real-estate trust.”
The Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, a #29Leaks partner, reported that Russian middlemen and Swedish offshore services providers had discovered and exploited a loophole in Sweden’s banking laws that gave the appearance that bank-named trusts were regulated when in fact those belonging to non-Swedes are not.
Swedish documents shared with McClatchy and the Miami Herald show Paul signing the trust registration on Feb. 20, 2017. He said he used another consultant called Global Money Consultants to create that company.
Paul also purchased a “bank” in Gambia, the smallest country on the African mainland but one with a large corruption problem, for years run by dictator Yahya Jammeh.
Formations House chief Charlotte Pawar’s late father, Nadeem Khan, had convinced Jammeh to create an enterprise zone, which allowed the London firm to fashion a line of business registering offshore companies there.
In an email to #29Leaks partners, O’Mara said he’d created more than 150 such banks in the Gambian offshore zone since 2013 for “wealthy families who want to handle their own finances.” The church doesn’t fit that description but O’Mara declined to discuss Paul’s offshore entities. Even though the Gambian enterprise zone was never fully authorized by the legislature there, banks sold for about $33,000 apiece today’s exchange rates, a price Paul didn’t dispute.