Walt Anderson speaking at a Space Frontier Foundation Conference in 2003. In 2000, Anderson invested $7 million in a project to turn the Russian Mir Space Station into a commercial venture.
Posted on 09/10/2006 8:13:09 PM PDT by anymouse
US telecommunications entrepreneur, Walter Anderson, pleaded guilty to tax evasion and fraud Friday in relation to what authorities said was the nation’s largest-ever criminal tax case.
Anderson was indicted in 2005 on charges he evaded $210 million in federal and local taxes. Prosecutors said Anderson used offshore corporations and bank accounts to hide income from tax collectors.
He pleaded guilty to two counts of tax evasion and one count of fraud Friday. He admitted hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in income from the Internal Revenue Service and from Washington, D.C., tax collectors during 1998 and 1999.
Under a plea deal with prosecutors, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
Anderson had been charged with evading more than $200m in taxes over five years and faces up to 80 years in prison if found guilty. He was an art collector and was alleged to have hidden more than $450m in profits from federal and local authorities by creating an elaborate network of offshore investment companies, disguising his ownership of the two primary companies Gold & Appel and Iceberg Transport and concealing his US citizenship. It is alleged that Anderson set up accounts at Barclays Bank in Jersey, falsely stating that he was a citizen of the Dominican Republic and used private mailing addresses in the Netherlands to evade tax.
According to the charges against Anderson, he transferred his holdings in three telecommunications companies Mid-Atlantic Telecom, Esprit Telecom and Telco Communications to G&A and Iceberg in the early 1990s. The authorities said that each investment became much more valuable in the following years, generating enough profit to enable Anderson to invest in other companies and make a $450m profit for G&A and Iceberg between 1995 and 1999.
In 1998 Anderson, who lived in Washington D.C., reported a total income of $67,939 and paid a tax of just $494. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Everson said that Anderson actually made at least $126 million that year that he never reported. From 1987 through 1993, Anderson failed to file a tax return.
Walt Anderson (52) who has been in prison since his arrest in March 2005, was CEO of Orbital Recovery Corp., and had played a major part of the competitive telecommunications industry which began in the U.S. in 1980 when MCI won a landmark legal decision which allowed it to compete with AT&T for long distance services. He successfully operated and sold many telecom operations and has been an investor, advisor, Chairman or board member for numerous other companies.
Anderson is the founder of Gold & Appel Transfer S.A., a venture capital and business development company with investment in private and public companies operating in telecommunication, aerospace and water transportation business. He was chairman of Satellite Media Services, which was created by Gold & Appel in 1997 to provide competitive access to satellite capacity linking most of the world to Europe. Satellite Media Services created and operates one of the worlds largest IP satellite networks. He is also a director of MirCorp, which was originally formed to privatize the MIR space station. MirCorp arranged for the first space ‘tourist’, Dennis Tito, to visit the International Space Station (ISS).
Walt Anderson speaking at a Space Frontier Foundation Conference in 2003. In 2000, Anderson invested $7 million in a project to turn the Russian Mir Space Station into a commercial venture.
Space and tax ping.
That was the first clue that he was all smoke and mirrors.
Really, really stupid.
L
That adds up to one day in jail for every $57,494.87
see:
http://www.escapeartist.com/OREQ21/Asset_Protection.html
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p54/ch06.html
Timing is everything, if Clinton was in office he could have bought a pardon as Marc Rich did.
I strongly agree with anymouse, and supplement his assertions with the following:
http://www.spaceprojects.com/Mir
Incidentally, a search at http://news.google.com shows that this recent news about Walt Anderson has been essentially ignored by the media. I wonder why.
If that's the case, can I skip paying taxes for the next ten years for one day in jail?
You can be a millionaire and never pay taxes.
-First, go out and make a million dollars.
-Then when the IRS comes to your house and says "You haven't paid your taxes" use two simple words in the English language, "I Forgot."
On a mildly related note, this article about porkbusting in the blogosophere might interest you:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-09-11-blogs-find-pork_x.htm
Please feel free to spread the following wherever you like:
Can you believe what the pork-barrelers are doing to the NASA-funded competitive prizes program (http://centennialchallenges.nasa.gov )?
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&dbname=cp109&sid=cp109s0tv8&refer=&r_n=sr280.109&item=&sel=TOC_385521&
"The Committee does not provide any funding in fiscal year 2007 for the Centennial Challenges program. Funding provided in previous fiscal years for this program is sufficient for NASA to run a prize based competition, as
well as to verify that NASA will see tangential benefits from running such a program. Providing additional funds to a program based on prizes only creates a pot of unused funds while other aspects of NASA's mission are
being cut or delayed due to a lack of funds."
Discussed here:
http://www.spacepolitics.com/archives/001028.html
and indirectly here: http://www.spaceprojects.com/prizes
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