Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. & Son, H. Merritt Paulson III: Thieves Like Us
Stealing from the taxpayer must be an art passed down from one generation of Paulsons to the next. While Henry M. Paulson Jr., former chairman of Goldman Sachs, has been busy lining his bank account with Treasury and Fed cash*, his son, H. Merritt Paulson III, has been sending Oregon state officials on lavish junkets to NY so they will lay out $85 million for his bullshit soccer stadium.
You can get an idea of how much money Hank Paulson Jr. stole from Goldman Sachs shareholders by the fancy name his son goes by. H. Merritt III - gag me, puhl-eeze. No surprise "H. Merritt III" married a "Heather", is there?
(Heather Lynn Paulson nee Mahar either went to the University of Michigan or was first in her class at Cornell as per her 10/2/05 NY Times wedding announcement.)
A sadly underreported but hilarious bit of Paulson family trivia is about the time Heather Lynn did a Rosie Ruiz when she was a contestant on "The Amazing Race" (CBS 2006-10-01. No. 3, season 10). Thanks to an honest cameraman, Heather Lynn got nabbed taking a cab when she was supposed to be walking.
Read the 990s filed by the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund - EIN
But in 2004, the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund received a contribution of $35 million from "HWY LLC", a Delaware corporation, in the form of ecologically important property on the island of Tierra Del Fuego on both the Chilean and Argentinan sides. The GS Charitable Fund tuned around and donated the land to the Wildlife Conservation Society that same year.
Coincidence or not, H. Merritt Paulson III became a trustee of the Wildlife Conservation Society in 2005, thus enhancing his resume in time for his New York Times wedding announcement.
How HWY LLC came to own valuable timberland which probably should belong to the people of Chile and Argentina was not disclosed in either the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund nor the Wildlife Conservation Society 990s.
Would anyone be surprised if Henry M. Paulson, Goldman Sachs chairman, laundered $35 million for an Argentinian or Chilean general who disappeared people and then took a tax deduction for his "good deed"?
More to come.
* If he objects to my characterization of him, Henry Paulson can disclose his and his family's financial holdings publicly. If he and his family are not benefitting from the biggest taxpayer ripoff in history, I will retract my statement. Paulson made a big deal out of divesting his Goldman Sachs stock before he took the Treasury job but it looked more like insider trading to me.
Do you ever wonder why there's so few people that comment on your rants?
As for Paulson - he probably owns a ton of muni bonds right now. I doubt the TARP or other projects have benfitted his financial holdings.
But if you're so obsessed with burning him at the stake you have every right to demand he disclose it.
PS - how exactly does Paulson "line his bank account with Fed cash"??
January 10, 2009 12:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
For the fifteenth or sixteenth time, please do not comment in my posts anymore.
January 10, 2009 7:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
so evidently "middle class bill"s job here is to discourage people from bringing up subjects that make him uncomfortable, as this is the second "dont post your ideas" ive seen from him in the last 4 minutes. i think your post is helpful and relevant, thank you for posting it.
January 10, 2009 1:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with you PeaceMF. If nothing else, this really shows that we are have let these SBs set up an oligarchy, a kind of hereditary nobility in this country. These families that keep lining up at the trough to gorge on tax payer dollars has got to stop. Besides that, Middle Class Bill, why do you think they call this site, Muckraker? It is not going to be pretty news, it is going to be hard-hitting accusatory exposure.
January 10, 2009 3:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
They could buy the soccer stadium with pocket change. The game of course is not soccer, but extorting government officials to finance the stadium. Pretty standard practice for modern business men.
January 10, 2009 3:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mrs P - for the 15 or 16th time I will continue to respond to your posts.
I don't try to discourage people from bringing up subjects and I'm not uncomfortable at all.
The point of TPM is for people to raise subjects and others debate them. That's what I'm doing.
Mrs P has said that Paulson has been "lining his bank account with Treasury and Fed cash". I'm curious why Mrs P thinks that. Usually people have some basis for their opinions before accusing others of things.
Mrs P seems upset that Paulson and family are somehow personally benefitting from this credit crisis.
January 10, 2009 9:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
And you're so critical of the "fancy name" that Hank's son goes by? Paulson named his son after himself. So it's not Merritt's fault. If anything you should blame Paulson for that.
January 10, 2009 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am not going to aver that Paulson personally benefited from any of this. But I want to know WHERE ALL THE MONEY WENT and then HOW WAS IT SPENT.
KEEP ON KEEPIN ON. DO NOT STOP.
The nice thing is that these posts wont be thrown away--as long as you do not erase them. I want to compare some of your findings to what we will see in the investigations by DOJ, Congress and civil attorneys representing the injured plaintiffs.
January 10, 2009 11:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
I recently heard of a technological nifty: those who monitor comments [at Boston.com] can place a "cookie" on a designated IP address and distinguish this IP with selective postings. They, in fact, can single out a miscreant's IP and have their troll-posting visible ONLY on that IP address. The panel discussing this chuckled at the prospect of some troll seeing their comment, but being naturally puzzled at the "lack" of response from others commenting.
Mmmmmyyyess.
January 10, 2009 2:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Keep digging. Mrs. P.
Methinks Mr Middle Class belies his name and shows his actual class allegiance.
So interesting that I just read LeCarre's new one, which has a laundering bank paying out to unexpected heir. Russian mafia in the story, but the weird land case here has an aroma, eh?
January 10, 2009 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
LOL - I don't why the guy spends so much time making a nuisance of himself in my posts since so few people read them.
Your comment made me curious enough to take another look at the Goldman Sachs Tierra Del Fuego land deal. It isn't as exotic as it seemed at first but I still can't figure what exactly transpired.
I wonder if Henry Paulson had a particular reason for wanting this land so badly. I read that Tierra Del Fuego has some of the best trout fishing in the world but most of the fishing sites are privately held.
Maybe Henry Paulson wanted to get his mitts on a world-class trout fishing site to impress his very wealthy business associates who do not impress easily.
I bet Paulson made sure the terms of the donation to the Wildlife Conservation Society limited access to the property to rich people a la the Nature Conservancy.
I'm pretty sure now that Paulson didn't buy the property from a general who disappeared people but the seller might have.
David R. Syre and his wife, Kay, apparently owned the property which consisted of a working sawmill and property in Argentina and the "ecologically important" property in Chile that Paulson was after.
Syre lives in Bellingham Washington and owns Trillium Corp., among other businesses. I'm not exactly sure what Trillium does but I think it does or did have to do with logging.
For some unknown reason, Capital Consultants, Inc., a Portland Oregon investment firm, held two notes owed by the Syres which were secured by the sawmill and property. One way Capital Consultants made money was selling shares in debt such as the Syre note to investors.
In 2001, the SEC found out that Capital Consultants had been running a Ponzi scheme on a $163 million loan for years by paying interest to older investors and taking in new ones. Capital also lied about selling the $163 millin note to two buyers.
As near as I can tell, Capital Consultants was then forced to liquidate and its assets were sold at an auction, the assets being the debt.
I found an SEC Form 13D filed by Goldman Sachs on 2/19/02 in connection with a publicly traded company named Quantrx.
The 13D appears to be a summary of all of the Capital Consultants assets bought at auction by Goldman Sachs with a description of the loan collateral and other documents.
One of the Syre loans is named Calafate Cayman Holdings, Inc and the other is Bayside, Ltd. There appears to have been a host of other transactions linked to these notes.
Goldman Sachs actualy bought land through its troubled debt subsidiary, MTGLQ Investors L.L.P. which in turn bought the land from its subsidiary, HWY LLC.
HWY LLC was first registered in Delaware in 2000 so if it was set up specifically to handle the land deal, something else was going on because the notes were not on the market until 2001.
HWY LLC broke the notes into two pieces. One note covered the sawmill and the Argentina property and the other covered the Chilean land. The sawmill note was valued at $9 million and was paid off within two years.
The Chilean note was purchased for $4 million but the land was appraised for $26 million resulting in a gain of $22 million.
I don't know why the Syres didn't sell the land and pay off the note themselves if the property was worth so much. They apparently had the financial wherewithal to pay off the $9 million note.
One of the big twists in this story is that David R. Syre was charged in a civil lawsuit filed by the SEC with helping to cook the books in a $450 million fraudulent investment scheme carried out by Metropolitan Mortgage and Securities, a Spokane firm.
The firm collapsed in 2003 but no one was charged until almost two years later, according to a 10/05 NY Times story by Gretchen Morgenson.
Hey! I just found a website, "Profile of the Trillium Corporation" put togetheer by George Draffan that has lots of news stories about the Syres, Trillium, Goldman Sachs and the Tierra Del Fuego deal.
When I have time later, I will read through it!
January 11, 2009 1:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Calafate" seems an alternate spelling for "Caliphate".
January 11, 2009 2:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Calafate is also a small scenic village near the Glacier Mountain Parj but what Cayman has do with is amyone's guess.
I couldn't find any searers
January 12, 2009 2:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I shouldn't post late at night. I have no idea what I meant by searers.
I looked around on the internet and couldn't find any evidence of operating sawmills on either side of Tierra Del Fuego. There were a couple of refences to visiting the sawmill district but no actual sawmills.
But according to the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund, the sawmill paid rent.
Admittedly, I didn't read the documents posted on the Trillium site closely but I don't recall reading that Syre ever had an operating sawmill in either Argentina or Chile.
Let's hope Syre and the general who disappeared people aren't secretly using slave labor to log rare and valauble timber somewhere in the middle of nowhere like a big national park and then selling it to Paulson's rich friends who like having something no one else does.
If I knew someone to write to in Tierra Del Fuego, I'd ask for info on operating sawmills and logging in that neck of the woods.
January 12, 2009 8:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mrs P - Goldman Sachs bought the land from Trillium back in 2003. Why do you think they stole it?
January 11, 2009 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
Read this link and you'll see how Goldman got the land in Chile.
http://www.endgame.org/trillium.html
January 11, 2009 11:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mrs Panstreppon, I was hoping you would continue writing information on B. Madoff. You have collected more information in your blogs than I can find searching articles from the corporate news media. I really appreciate your work.
February 12, 2009 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink