This is why Delaware is so popular with business: It’s easy to set up a shell company there.
NOTHING about 1209 North Orange Street hints at the secrets inside. It’s a humdrum office building, a low-slung affair with a faded awning and a view of a parking garage. Hardly worth a second glance. If a first one.
But behind its doors is one of the most remarkable corporate collections in the world: 1209 North Orange, you see, is the legal address of no fewer than 285,000 separate businesses.
Its occupants, on paper, include giants like American Airlines, Apple, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Cargill, Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, Google, JPMorgan Chase, and Wal-Mart. These companies do business across the nation and around the world. Here at 1209 North Orange, they simply have a dropbox.
What attracts these marquee names to 1209 North Orange and to other Delaware addresses also attracts less-upstanding corporate citizens. For instance, 1209 North Orange was, until recently, a business address of Timothy S. Durham, known as “the Midwest Madoff.” On June 20, Mr. Durham was found guilty of bilking 5,000 mostly middle-class and elderly investors out of $207 million. It was also an address of Stanko Subotic, a Serbian businessman and convicted smuggler — just one of many Eastern Europeans drawn to the state.
Big corporations, small-time businesses, rogues, scoundrels and worse — all have turned up at Delaware addresses in hopes of minimizing taxes, skirting regulations, plying friendly courts or, when needed, covering their tracks. Federal authorities worry that, in addition to the legitimate businesses flocking here, drug traffickers, embezzlers and money launderers are increasingly heading to Delaware, too. It’s easy to set up shell companies here, no questions asked.
“Shells are the No. 1 vehicle for laundering illicit money and criminal proceeds,” said Lanny A. Breuer, assistant attorney general for the criminal division of the Justice Department. “It’s an enormous criminal justice problem. It’s ridiculously easy for a criminal to set up a shell corporation and use the banking system, and we have to stop it.”
In these troubled economic times, when many states are desperate for tax dollars, Delaware stands out in sharp relief. The First State, land of DuPont, broiler chickens and, as it happens, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., increasingly resembles a freewheeling offshore haven, right on America’s shores. Officials in other states complain that Delaware’s cozy corporate setup robs their states of billions of tax dollars. Officials in the Cayman Islands, a favorite Caribbean haunt of secretive hedge funds, say Delaware is today playing faster and looser than the offshore jurisdictions that raise hackles in Washington.
And international bodies, most recently the World Bank, are increasingly pointing fingers at the state.
Delaware has been a plantation state forever, too, thanks to the DuPont family.
Delaware has been a plantation state forever, too, thanks to the DuPont family.
that’s less true than it used to be. when i was growing up in delaware, the duponts really did rule the roost there. but since it has become the US base for big banks and multinational companies, the influence of the duponts has waned a bit, just because it has been overwhelmed by all the others.
Pretty much a fact, the vast majority, if not all, of the “Multinationals” were incorporated in Delaware. I guess this has been allowed to be released in the New York Times as it is way too late now to address this to our thoroughly Multinational Corp owned “public servants” (pubic as in the negative meaning as high violent, dehumanizing and degrading s&m porn, likely would have worked there too). I’m sure it was never a secret to the powers that be at the NYT, as, actually: … it’s certainly never been a secret to our bipartisan pubic servants.
Oh, and what about that lovely LIBOR rate, Global Thuggery by the Ivory Towered?