NEW: Loeffler Firm’s “Offshore Tax Dodge” Included the “Notorious” Ugland House Tax Shelter

As Georgians were reeling from the Great Recession, Loeffler helped banks avoid paying federal taxes — “one of the most egregious examples of an offshore tax dodge”

ATLANTA — A new Salon report today reveals new details in unelected “political mega-donor” Senator Kelly Loeffler’s dealings at the financial management company Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) – the company her husband founded and she remains invested in – that created an infamous Cayman Islands “offshore tax dodge.”

A new filing shows that in the “months after the Great Recession brought the global economy to its knees,” the tax haven was registered at the infamous Ugland House, “one of the most notorious locations for offshore tax shelters.”

Loeffler “played no small role” in helping “some of the world’s biggest banks to avoid paying U.S. taxes on their risky Wall Street bets” at a time when Georgia families were suffering in the aftermath of Wall Street’s reckless behavior. But new reporting demonstrates that not only did Loeffler and Sprecher’s company help big banks skip out on their taxes, but did so at a location “for years pilloried and parodied as one of the most egregious examples of an offshore tax dodge in the world.”

Loeffler is “a walking conflict of interest.” She received a “lucrative parting gift” from ICE after the company unexpectedly “altered the terms” of her compensation before her appointment — and she still sits on a committee that serves as “an overseer of the overseers of the company that made her rich.” Earlier this week, Loeffler violated Senate ethics rules and federal law by fundraising from a Congressional office building, and now faces several complaints. 

Read more about the latest development in Loeffler and ICE’s Wall Street tax dodge:

Salon: Kelly Loeffler marketed derivatives during Great Recession at world’s most notorious tax haven

• Months after the Great Recession brought the global economy to its knees, a financial management company called Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) created a way for the world’s biggest banks to keep trading in the very financial instruments that contributed to the crisis in the first place.

• To help those clients duck U.S. tax laws, ICE created an offshore entity in the Cayman Islands, and registered it in a building known as Ugland House — one of the most notorious locations for offshore tax shelters.

• Nearly 100,000 companies worldwide avail themselves of the Cayman Islands’ 0% tax rate to duck corporate taxes — twice the size of the territory’s population.

• Ugland House, a modest five-story building in the capital of George Town, is home to nearly 19,000 corporate entities, or one corporation for every three square feet of space in the building.

• Former President Barack Obama remarked of Ugland House in 2008, “Either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world.”

• In 2013 the Associated Press called it “a notorious tax shelter.” Foreign Policy magazine said in 2012 that “the building makes a mockery of the U.S. tax system.”

• The ICE Cayman Islands arrangement incentivized the largest American financial institutions to execute CDS trades around the world by allowing them to dodge U.S. taxes on their profits.

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