As we are quickly coming to understand, AIG Financial Products was siphoning billions from tax coffers the old-fashioned way ages before the collateral calls began flooding in. Essentially, the same unregulated swaps and options contracts in which AIG FP “specialized” a.k.a. “did not understand” lay at the heart of many of the sham “partnerships” corporations and wealthy people use to obscure their capital gains. These partnerships are often referred to as “Son of Boss,” we still do not know why, and the IRS has been shutting down them down for years, because it is usually abundantly clear that the rich people who bought said derivatives had no idea what the hell they were for beyond “generating artificial basis” or somesuch euphemism for “pretending they lost money to hide the fact that they actually raked it in.” That said, most of the people with enough money to know about tax shelters are/have pretty decent lawyers, so sometimes they think up a pretty good excuse for having invested in a baffling combination of esoteric “swaps” and such. Last month, for instance, a Los Angeles judge struck down a Son of Boss partnership that had spared a pair of local real estate developers an accumulated tax bill of $145 million by investing $2 million in some obscure AIG credit default swaps. But one of the developers, former Sacramento Kings owner and former IRS attorney James Thomas, had a pretty genius alibi.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=144310