Chuck Darwin<p>Rarely do private companies find themselves punished for using <a href="https://c.im/tags/shell" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>shell</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/companies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>companies</span></a> to move capital and avoid taxes. </p><p>The fine accountants at Ernst &amp; Young cooked up a complicated scheme in 2008 for a restructuring of <a href="https://c.im/tags/Koch" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Koch</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Industries" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Industries</span></a> via shell entities in Luxembourg, <br>a notorious tax haven, with the reasonable expectation that the ruse would never be revealed. </p><p>But then someone leaked a raft of private documents from <a href="https://c.im/tags/Mossack" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Mossack</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Fonseca" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fonseca</span></a>, a law firm in Panama that specializes in the creation of shell companies. </p><p>The info dump became known as the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Panama" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Panama</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Papers" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Papers</span></a>, and among its many revelations was Koch Industries’ bid to reinvent parts of the company, on paper, <br>as tax-avoidant Luxembourg shell companies. </p><p>According to the Center for Public Integrity, the essence of the Koch Industries deal was to <br>“reorder the ownership of many subsidiaries and centralize them under Luxembourg companies that are all served by internal corporate finance companies, <br>akin to a company’s own bank.”</p><p>Maybe that’s where the Koch siblings got the idea to get behind <a href="https://c.im/tags/DonorsTrust" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DonorsTrust</span></a><br>—a sort of house bank for the array of political entities and think tanks they fund. </p><p>Of course, as with all of the organizations funded by Koch, they’re not in it alone. </p><p><a href="https://c.im/tags/Betsy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Betsy</span></a> and <a href="https://c.im/tags/Dick" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Dick</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/DeVos" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DeVos</span></a> helped fund DonorsTrust, according to Mother Jones.</p><p>And then there are the many Koch-network “pass-through” groups, such as "Freedom Partners"<br>and the "Center to Protect Patient Rights", <br>which function much the way that shell companies do in the world of private capital: <br>-- they add layers of obfuscation over the provenance of the dollars flowing from one right-wing organization or institution to the next.</p><p>For instance, there’s the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Wellspring" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Wellspring</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Committee" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Committee</span></a>, <br>a pass-through funded in part via the Koch network, whose director, Ann Corkery, also sat for six years on the board of the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Becket" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Becket</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Fund" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fund</span></a> for <a href="https://c.im/tags/Religious" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Religious</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Liberty" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Liberty</span></a>, <br>a pro-bono law firm, according to tax filings. </p><p>With its portfolio of so-called religious freedom cases, <br>the Becket Fund gained notice as the firm representing the principals of the <a href="https://c.im/tags/Hobby" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Hobby</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/Lobby" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Lobby</span></a> company in <br>a 2014 Supreme Court challenge to a mandate in the Affordable Care Act <br>for employer-based health insurance to cover, <br>without a co-pay, the costs of prescription <a href="https://c.im/tags/contraception" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>contraception</span></a>.</p><p>One type of private company is the “<a href="https://c.im/tags/closely" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>closely</span></a> <a href="https://c.im/tags/held" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>held</span></a>” variety, which may occasionally trade stock publicly, but has only a few shareholders. </p><p>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.</p>