Harrold Simmons <3 Republicans – a LOT

Hat Tip to Mark Stoneman

Earlier tonight in the BC Political Forums Mark posted a link to an article about an anti-Obama ad that American Issues Project, a nonprofit 501(c)4 organization, is running. Fox News refused to run the radical ad without saying specifically why they refused the $2.8 million dollar ad buy.

In the original article, the American Issues Project spokesman promised to identify the contributions used to pay for the ad. They did that today. It turns out that there was only one donor. You may have heard of the organization, Billionaires for Bush, and seen some of their oh so stylish rallies and events, but in this case, the anti-Obama ad is funded by a real Billionaire for Bush – Dallas billionaire Harrold Simmons, who made his first fortune in chain pharmacies and is now listed as the 73rd richest person in the world, with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $2.1 billion.

A quick check on OpenSecrets.org shows that the Simmons family has given $50,600 to the RNC and a variety of Republican candidates so far this year. It gets a little more interesting when you go back to last year during the Republican primary. The Simmons clan, including Harrold Simmons, his wife Annette, his brother Glenn and Glenn’s wife spread their money across all the main GOP primary contenders. Between February 21st and March 23rd of 2007 they gave $4,600 to Mitt Romney, $6,900 to Rudy Giuliani, and $9,200 to John McCain.

Harrold Simmons is also listed as a major fund raiser on the McCain website in the $50,000 – $100,000 range. Harrold Simmons also donated $100,000 to George W. Bush’s 2004 inaugural ball. Luckily he could afford easily. In 1997 Simmons made a $5 million investment in T. Boone Pickens, Jr. first fund BP Capital Energy Commodity Fund, by 2005 this had grown to $150 million.

Harrold Simmons has a long history of over-the-top campaign donation problems. About ten years ago, Mr. Simmons had to fend off a lawsuit brought by his own daughters. This brought to light techniques that Harrold Simmons used to get around the weaker campaign contribution limits in place back then.

Daughters Do Battle With a Corporate King Lear

… The daughters, one from each of his first two marriages, present themselves in court papers and in interviews as victims of a tyrannical father who set up their trusts solely to fend off creditors, tax collectors and ex-wives, and who now use their inheritance for contributions, some of them illegal, to Republican dinosaurs they would never go near.

As an example of what Andrea calls her father’s coerciveness, she said in an interview that he gave her $1,000 for each of at least 10 blank political donation forms she signed a few years ago. Mr. Simmons confirms this account, , while calling it not a quid pro quo, but fatherly affection. ”When she would sign forms for me,” he said, ”I would feel loving toward her and kind and I would give her extra money.”

Mr. Simmons was fined $19,800 by the Federal Election Commission in 1993 for breaking campaign donation limits, and already, disclosures demanded by the daughters have pushed him into another retreat. Each, he says, will receive $15,000 from his many political action committees to correct what he now says was a tactic that ran afoul of the $5,000 limit on individual contributions.

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NOTE: Harrold Simmons pathological hatred of taxes was tearing his family apart as shown in the info below.

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That almost all his wealth accumulated in his daughters’ trusts passed with little notice until about 1991, when the Internal Revenue Service began asking questions. Why were his homes, his jet, even the jewelry his wife wore, accounted for as corporate purchases or expenses? How could he say that all his holdings formed one huge tax-exempt trust when he treated them as properties he still owned, managed and enjoyed?

The I.R.S. wanted to tax the trust’s past and future payouts to his daughters at 73 percent, including estate and income taxes, he said. Mr. Simmons agreed to pay more than $600,000 to settle back taxes for five years, then hit on a novel strategy to preserve his tax advantages.

UNDER a recent Texas law, he split the trust evenly in two. He counted one as his contribution, the other as that of his former wife, Sandra, but remained the trustee in charge of both. Sandra’s trust could then still make payouts tax-free.

But he had solved only half his problem. The I.R.S. wanted to treat the Harrold trust as no trust at all, taxable upon his death at 55 percent. Paying the hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes would have forced a broader and ruinous liquidation of his investments, he said.

By early 1996, he and his advisers had a solution: dissolve the Harrold fund and put the proceeds in a charitable trust. He and his wife could enjoy the proceeds while they lived and then his children could parcel out the money after the parents died. But this plan required a court filing — a lawsuit, really — against his children and grandchildren, and then his children’s signed agreements.

New York Times: Daughters Do Battle With a Corporate King Lear

The lawsuit mentioned above was eventually settled with Simmons paying his daughters $50,000 each. In the news coverage of the lawsuit it came out that Simmons filed what he had hoped would be procedural, uncontested lawsuits against his daughters two years ago to dissolve one of his two trusts for tax purposes.

They said they had never known that virtually all his companies, his homes and his $18 million Falcon 2000 jet were owned by the trusts, and that his charitable and political contributions were made from the trusts. They demanded his removal as trustee, an event that Mr. Simmons said would cause the liquidation of his holdings and tax bills high enough to ruin him.