And please don't tell me that our politicians don't know about this. And the REBNY certainly has to not only know, but it also welcomes and indulges such a situation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreign-wealth-flows-to-time-warner-condos.html
We need someone to fumigate what's going on in the city.
41 comments:
"This town needs an enema!"
WOW. This is bad. De Blasio "build higher" is for criminals of the worse kind. The crimes these guys commit have thousands and millions of victims. I would rather let the petty criminal walk the streets who shoplifts or steals a wallet and put these guys in the prisons. These are serious crimes with serious long term consequences. This is so sleazy - of course Goldman Sachs is mentioned and of course Lloyd blankfein is on De Blasio's Best and Brightest. De Blasio has officially lost my vote ever again for anything. Cuomo/Silver/Skelos are dirtier then imagined. I guess Schneiderman's one set of rules for all doesn't apply to these billionaires.
Thank you NY Times. Love the NY Times for writing this. Love the NY Times anyway, but moreso now. I hope the world knows real New Yorkers are not ok with this and are not like-minded with the lawmakers who wrote the NY and American laws for the world's money launderers.
RE is a culture of sleaze. They don;t care from where the money comes - even if its human / child trafficking? Disgusting. De Blasio should not allow this REBNY build higher money laundering.
"A spokeswoman for the Related Companies, Joanna Rose, said the developer had followed all federal and local laws in its sales at the Time Warner Center,.."
Then there is a problem with the laws and a corruption amongst the lawmakers.
"The lax American laws were being used by other countries as an excuse for inaction."
The whole world sees and know America is corrupt and hypocritical when it comes to money laundering and NY is the biggest criminal haven. These are the world's worst, most repulsive, criminals. RE brokers are not private bankers - they are sleazy complicit low level criminals.
These lawmakers write laws that are killing the middle class and enabling the billionaire criminals who don't follow laws anyway.
NY is a joke to the world. NY government is the dirtiest. Lawmakers are monumentally failing the people of NY.
There is not one set of rules for all in NY.
On another note, lack of transparency is here too. The TAboard is secretive, shady and PCVST dil and ST Owner LP are who exactly? Who signed the DOB permits as owner here? Surely not the owner which they hid for years which begs the question why are they hiding who ST Owner is and who PCVST dil is?
ANIL AGARWAL Chairman of Vedanta, has to be one of the most, if not the most repulsive thing on the planet.
Many REBNY members have to be investigated, indicted, arrested, imprisoned. Skelos/Cuomo have to join Silver soon. De Blasio / Shorris / Glen need to follow suit. NY government is a punch line.
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
Abraham Lincoln
Thanks STR. Good article.
RE is so sleazy.
NYC politicians, law enforcers and lawmakers are corrupt to the core. Preet needs to put them all in prison.
Unbelievable, except that I do believe it. I think the REBNY and the politicians it possesses are aiming to bring this country (starting with New York City) to its knees. I'm beginning to wonder now if 911 really was an inside job. I never thought that way before, but seeing the hungry shark fights over the prime real estate in lower Manhattan and the way things have gone with the RE cabal since 9/11, I am really beginning to suspect there was more to it than just a few nutjobs (very intelligent nutjobs) involved in the demolition of the Twin Towers and the soaring value of RE, along with all the money-laundering that went with it. When it all comes out in the open I think we will be surprised to see just who was behind it all. Or maybe we won't be so surprised, just very, very betrayed.
As bad as the REBNY and some politicians are, I don't think the aim is bring NYC to its knees. Money rules and blinds.
Thank you New York Times.
Thank you Carl Levin.
Love
Middle Class at Peter Cooper Village Stuyvesant Town
I fear 11:31 and STR at 11:41 are both right. The "Human" factor is not a consideration in the pursuit of money for the likes of REBNY, Wall Street, Brookfield/CWCR, Fortress, Goldman Sachs, Extell, Litwin, Lorber, Blackstone, Tishman Speyer,most NY politicians, ..... nor is the Environment. Greed for money considers only itself in its endeavors to reach its goals.
The root of the problem is the laws and lawmakers writing laws to enable write collar crimes by Wall Street and RE. That is why Dan keeps saying they can screw us because it is legal. De Blasio social welfare programs fuel the crimes, by not addressing the bad laws, the bad lawmakers, and creating programs to keep people quiet. NO MORE.
THE NY LAWMAKERS HAVE TO GO.
ALL OF THEM.
CLEAN HOUSE!
Who is Brookfield
Epic letter SEC sent to Brookfield on their opaqueness -- lack of transparency
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1202157/000000000009030925/filename1.pdf
The SEC is being extremely gentle - helping Brookfield be compliant rather than calling it what it is - noncompliance.
MS451 Inc. Brookfield
How they operate with regards to residential assets
http://sirf-online.org/2013/11/18/brookfields-looking-glass-world/
Brookfield’s Brazilian Headache
On Friday when Brookfield Asset Management released its third quarter results, it revealed an interesting development in another whole line of business in another corner of world – one involving potential fraud.
It revealed in the “Risks” section a new disclosure that the SEC and U.S. Department of Justice are investigating allegations that a Brazilian private equity unit had bribed local officials to approve certain real estate transactions. A public prosecutor in São Paulo has filed charges against three Brookfield Asset Management executives and seven municipal officials under the country’s anti-bribery statutes.
The recent charges emerged following Brookfield Asset Management’s April 2010 dismissal of Daniela Spinola Gonzalez, the former chief financial officer of a Brookfield-managed real estate fund in São Paulo.
Reached by the Southern Investigative Reporting Foundation, Gonzalez said that in the spring of 2009 she uncovered a series of payments to São Paulo municipal officials aimed at obtaining approval of expansion projects at four different malls. Specifically she alleges they were designed to cover up the real estate fund’s lack of compliance with a series of pre-expansion mandates from the São Paulo building approval department designed to address a potential increase in traffic flow. When she discovered requests to approve large payments to holding companies she had never heard of, she investigated further and found municipal officials had set up entities to receive payments from the real estate fund.
http://sirf-online.org/2013/11/18/brookfields-looking-glass-world/
Asked about the illicit real estate bribery charges a spokesperson said Brookfield investigated itself and found it has done nothing wrong.
Asked about Gonzalez and her charges, Brookfield Asset Management spokesman Andrew Willis said, among other statements, “Notwithstanding the suspect source of the allegations, Brookfield conducted an investigation into these matters. The investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by Brookfield or any of its employees.”
WHEW because spokespeople are always honest and self-investigations are always reliable.
http://sirf-online.org/2013/11/18/brookfields-looking-glass-world/
The Brookfield Reporting is brought to us by
http://sirf-online.org/about-us/
Board of Directors
A former senior reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and Bloomberg News and the author of many books on journalism, Christopher Roush serves as the director of the business journalism program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The author of three best-selling books exposing the inner workings of Wall Street’s highest-profile firms, The Last Tycoons, House of Cards and Money and Power, William D. Cohan is a former investment banker who now serves as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and columnist for Bloomberg News.
The Huffington Post named Roderick Boyd one of the 25 most feared financial reporters in America. His book about the near collapse of AIG, Fatal Risk, was long listed for 2011’s Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year. A former staffer at Fortune, the New York Post, The New York Sun and Institutional Investor News, Boyd edits The Financial Investigator blog. In addition to teaching investigative reporting at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), he regularly leads seminars at Investigative Reporters and Editors conferences on Financial Statement Analysis and Fraud Detection.
Bethany McLean is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and a former Fortune magazine editor. She is co-author of two best-selling books on corporate fraud, All the Devils Are Here and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which served as the basis for an Academy Award-nominated film.
A veteran editor and columnist who helped pioneer financial journalism at New York magazine, Forbes, the New York Observer and the New York Post, Christopher Byron is the author of numerous books on corporate wrongdoing, including Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild and Martha Inc.: The Incredible Story of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
Who is Brookfield and Partner's Limited
Amounting to what is in effect an old-line Wall Street partnership built into a publicly traded company, Partners Limited consists of a group of about 45 current and former corporate officers of Brookfield Asset Management who privately control 20 percent of its shares—and given Brookfield Asset Management’s dual-share structure, its operations and governance, Partners Limited is an oasis of concentrated corporate wealth. Considering Partner Limited’s big stake in Brookfield Asset Management and its other subsidiaries, and the widespread cross ownership of shares by Brookfield Asset Management and its subsidiaries, there is plenty of incentive for the managers of Brookfield Asset Management to use every last loophole to boost earnings.
Regulatory Concerns
Investors brave enough to wade through Brookfield’s opaque public filings might take solace in knowing that they aren’t the only ones with a laundry list of questions and concerns.
Recently the Securities and Exchange Commission has been peppering Brookfield with a series of increasingly probing queries and, in its own, stilted bureaucratic language, demanding some serious changes to how Brookfield and its subsidiaries disclose details about their operations to investors.
Brookfield Property Partners, a publicly traded limited partnership spun out of Brookfield Asset Management to hold its commercial real estate operations, has been an object of fascination for the SEC’s accounting mavens. Their communications, in a series of letters and responses carrying on for several months from 2012 to this year, represent an unusually bold turn for the SEC, an agency whose track record is anything but aggressive when it comes to parsing corporate filings to find looming investor headaches.
Feb 5, 2013 - State prosecutor alleges bribes for construction permits
SAO PAULO, Feb 5 (Reuters) - A Brazilian prosecutor filed charges on Tuesday against a unit of Canada's Brookfield Asset Management Inc. alleging the subsidiary paid bribes to obtain permits needed to expand a Sao Paulo shopping center.
Brookfield Brasil Shopping Centers, a property-management company, allegedly paid 1.3 million reais ($656,000) to a city representative and chief inspector who approved construction at the Shopping Patio Paulista, according to civil charges filed by state prosecutor Marcelo Camargo Milani.
"There are a series of documents showing that reforms had been paralyzed for two years and then permits appeared within four days of the payments," Milani said in an interview.
He said damages in the suit could start around 30 million reais and climb to more than 20 times that.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/05/brookfield-brazil-idUSL1N0B5O7U20130205
Construction Permits within four days - where have we heard that before?
Seriously, good for the Times for this reporting.
Few states actually require ownership info on LLC reports and what is collected by state filing agencies isn't verified because they lack the authority and resources to investigate.
So Congress needs to do what the Justice Dept has been pushing for: tightening the laws that allow and encourage the movement of mostly untraceable money across our borders via these LLC shell companies. Banks, hedge funds, and real estate industries are powerful and will continue to oppose that. So will states like Delaware and Nevada who rake in big money from it. There's also the fervently anti-regulation GOP majority in House and Senate, but this can also be framed as a law and order/organized crime issue that has to be addressed.
Pressure needs to be applied. Time to put in calls to Schumer - ESPECIALLY Schumer, Gillibrand, and Maloney.
Schumer's brother is REBNY Paul Weiss
Maloney writes laws for REBNY
Who is Gillibrand?
The TA is now raffling off tickets to the Circus (institutionalized animal abuse, IMO) on its fb page. God forbid they should address any serious issues. They are getting more and more like CW: Distract the peasants with bread and circuses while destroying their homes.
At the opening of the new playground at Asser-Levy Dan Garodnick confided that he’d actually told his son that the playground had been named after him.
“There are no limits to my deception,” Garodnick said.
That is probably the first true statement uttered by Dan Garodnick in years.
The root of the problem is the laws and lawmakers writing laws to enable write collar crimes by Wall Street and RE. That is why Dan keeps saying they can screw us because it is legal. De Blasio social welfare programs fuel the crimes, by not addressing the bad laws, the bad lawmakers, and creating programs to keep people quiet. NO MORE.
THE NY LAWMAKERS HAVE TO GO.
ALL OF THEM.
CLEAN HOUSE!
Only problem is once elected a Democrat could kill someone on video yet he/she would still be re-elected. There is no group as stupid as NY voters anywhere in the world.
If Dan really did have a shot , and a serious interest in ownership of the property, he would have come forward again and again. No words from him since that day on the corner of 16th street. He's out. Tenants will never own. Does not matter if you or I want to or not.
>>At the opening of the new playground at Asser-Levy Dan Garodnick confided that he’d actually told his son that the playground had been named after him.
“There are no limits to my deception,” Garodnick said.<<
We really need a source on this!
We really need a source on this!
I read it on the T&V website in the article about the opening of the Asser Levy playground.
Stuy Town Reporter said...
>>At the opening of the new playground at Asser-Levy Dan Garodnick confided that he’d actually told his son that the playground had been named after him.
“There are no limits to my deception,” Garodnick said.<<
We really need a source on this!
February 9, 2015 at 8:42 AM
Sabina Mollot
Dan should choose his words more carefully, even in jest.
http://www.icij.org/project/swiss-leaks/banking-giant-hsbc-sheltered-murky-cash-linked-dictators-and-arms-dealers
ICIJ -- The World’s Best Cross-Border Investigative Team -- The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
The main Article on HSBC failing in its reform. Senator Levin is on the right track and some one needs to pick up where he left off because I think he may have retired. NYC RE needs to be investigated, prosecuted, halted.
ICIJ covered The Real "Housewives" and other occupations titles given so clients could fake having no income. One Real Housewife is mega wealthy New Yorker Mary Wells Greene who pioneered the I Love New York heart ad campaign.
The files obtained by ICIJ show that she was beneficial owner of four accounts – two of them still open by 2006. Out of those two, one was held under the name of a Bahamas offshore company, Five Angels Investment Limited, and contained a maximum amount of $138.5 million in 2006/2007. The other account, named Sandia Corporation Limited, held as much as $1.9 million during those years.
http://www.icij.org/project/swiss-leaks/real-housewives-hsbc
Next in the Times series
Another shady corrupt criminal developer - screwing the military veterans out of their homes and life savings while living the high life at the Time Warner Center. Wasn't Time Warner one of the biggest contributors to politicians pockets? Anyone know to whom and how much Time Warner gave or bought?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/nyregion/kabul-chawla-bptp-india-real-estate-manhattan.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fnyregion%2Findex.jsonp
Cuomo's assault on hard working New Yorkers who owe $5000 in back taxes with punishment to take away their means of transportation to work is repugnant and threatens the people's ability to pay taxes when they can't get to work to make money, but if he wants to be deliberately cruel he should do so to all who owe taxes including the HSBC evaders.
Wealthy 1% who were evading taxes via HSBC came from 203 countries. That is 203 countries where the infrastructure, roads, schools, etc were robbed by the wealthy and the 99% carried the weight of tax burdens to support the infrastructures.
HSBC's Swiss accounts in numbers
106,000 clients with Swiss bank accounts
203 countries involved
$118bn total assets held in Swiss accounts
11,235 clients from Switzerland held $31.2bn
9,187 clients from France held $12.5bn
7,000 clients from UK held $21.7bn
Source: ICIJ/Panorama
Of those, around 2,900 clients were connected to the US, providing the IRS with a trail of evidence of potential American taxpayers who may have been hiding assets in Geneva.
The Guardian has reviewed the list of US clients with accounts in HSBC’s private Swiss bank. They include prominent film directors, sports stars, hedge fund managers, retail magnates and major political donors. The HSBC files provide no indication as to whether US clients declared their assets to the IRS.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/08/us-government-biggest-leak-banking-history-questions-irs-taxes
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-31248913
Part 1 - Loss of affordable middle class homes at Stuyvesant Town Peter Cooper Village impacts the residents, all regulated homes in NYC and across the country. This is a very big failure of all who held public office this century. Their names should be memorialized.
Winter 2006
A Very High Stakes Deal
The $5.4 billion sale of Manhattan's last middle-class enclave might have been prevented if there had been progressive policies in place.
"But this need never have become a question of subsidy. With smart regulatory action, by repealing vacancy decontrol, Stuy Town could be preserved as affordable housing for the long-term. And the same is true for other rental housing, subsidized and unsubsidized, in cities around the country. It is possible to use smart regulations, in an economically, socially and politically viable way, to permanently preserve affordable housing in rising markets. In many cases buildings will need additional investments over the years, but these will be far more affordable if they are geared to the successful operation of the building, rather than the speculative windfall profits of deregulation.
The pending loss of affordable units at Stuy Town, and the broader loss of rent-regulated units around the country, reveals the problem with an affordable housing strategy based primarily on leveraging the market. The Bloomberg administration has undoubtedly the strongest municipal housing program in the country, but it is based largely on leveraging the success of NYC's housing market to create new units of affordable housing. The administration has sought to preserve existing subsidized units, but generally through financial incentives rather than regulation.
However, the challenge of affordability in hot market cities cannot be solved exclusively through adding new affordable units. From 2002 to 2005, even as the Bloomberg administration's aggressive new 10-year plan kicked in, the number of units renting for less than $1,000 (the rent affordable to a family of four earning $36,000 per year, or two workers working full-time at nearly double the minimum wage) fell by 155,000. The share of families paying more than half of their income for rent grew from 28.6 percent to 31.2 percent. And for hundreds of thousands of low-income New Yorkers not lucky enough to live in subsidized housing, the share paying more than half of their (low) incomes for rent rose from 43.9 percent to a staggering 50 percent. There is simply no way for New York City to exclusively build its way out of this problem.
Part 2 Public radio host Brian Lehrer, generally known as an objective observer of NYC politics, sums it up best, saying, "As government struggles to create new affordable housing, it's just plain weird in my opinion to have a [vacancy decontrol] law that is systematically abolishing it." Victor Bach, a senior policy analyst for the Community Service Society, shares a similar logic. "We're losing more at one end than we're gaining in affordable housing at the other end through the mayor's plan," he says. "This just tips the balance even worse. It's more difficult to make the argument that the efforts of the city in affordable housing, which deserve a lot of praise, are going to compensate for the market losses that occur through sales."
For all the work conservatives have done to give them a bad name, rent regulations - especially when smartly tailored - could be broadly appealing as progressive metropolitan policy. They help to solve the problems with a housing strategy that only focuses on "leveraging the market." They address the challenges of displacement and gentrification as neighborhoods improve, without preventing new development. They can unite poor, working-class and middle-class families and help a very broad range of households. And yet they require no new public expenditures.
Or to put it more simply, as Brian Lehrer does: "Better yet, why not repeal any law that throws affordable housing away?"
Copyright 2006
Brad Lander director of Pratt Center for Community Development in NYC
NHI National Housing Institute
Fostering decent affordable housing & a vibrant community for everyone
http://nhi.org/
http://nhi.org/online/issues/148/highstakes.html
Funding The City
http://www.rooflines.org/4026/funding_the_city/
As reported by Jimmy Vielkind at Capital New York, Sheehan argued that “the funding mechanism for cities—property taxes—was set up at a time when cities were regional centers of wealth and industry. Times have changed, she said, and so should financial structures.”
In other words had the lawmakers written laws for constituents instead of laws for REBNY the Middle Class might have survived.
Dan should choose his words more carefully, even in jest.
Agreed STR. I've always heard there's a lot of truth in jest!
My grandmother had a saying:
Spoken in jest. Meant in ernest.
Holy crap.
The clients of HSBC have direct access in business and at parties to those holding offices of lawmaking and are at times writing the laws the politicians pass. The People deserve and need to know the names of each and every client involved in this HSBC scheme to cross reference with the politicians they are connected to and the favorable laws that have been passed for the HSBC client's respective businesses.
Are these our NYC luxury condo owning neighbors?
http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/12/hsbc-files-swiss-bank-hid-money-for-suspected-criminals
http://mobile.nation.co.ke/news/Anura-Perera-the-billionaire-behind-questionable-deals/-/1950946/2325784/-/format/xhtml/-/3aua1y/-/index.html
Brookfield Manhattan West Towers built by Chinese Money
http://www.rew-online.com/2015/01/14/brookfield-starts-work-on-manhattan-west-apartment-tower/
Brookfield Property Partners announced that construction has begun on a 62-story residential tower at Manhattan West that will contain 844 units with 20 percent of the studio, one- and two-bedroom units priced at affordable rates.
Brookfield has closed on$479 million in HFA credit enhanced bonds through the Bank of China with a seven-year term to fund the construction."
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-04/housing-bubble-goes-mainstream
"While it isn't news to regular readers, the fact that one of the key pillars of the "housing recovery" (the other three being foreign oligarchs parking cash in the US courtesy of an Anti Money Laundering regulation-exempt NAR, foreclosure stuffing and, of course, the Fed's $40 billion in monthly MBS purchases) have been the very biggest Wall Street firms (many of whom had to be bailed out the last time the housing bubble burst) who have also become the biggest institutional landlords "using other people's very cheap money" to buy up tens of thousands of properties, appears to still be lost on the larger population."
Blackstone (who partnered with Robbie in 2006 to kill us off and who Cuomo appointed to run the tenant protection agency DHCR)
(RE) “The growth is being propelled by institutional money,” in other words the economy and housing market is not getting better. The institutions are getting richer and the people are still struggling while the politicians are lying claiming a recovery.
"Blackstone, which helped define a period of Wall Street hyperwealth, has bought some 26,000 homes in nine states. Most of the firms are renting out the homes, with the possibility of unloading them at a profit when prices rise far enough."
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-04/housing-bubble-goes-mainstream
The NYT Exposes The Criminal Money-Laundering Underworld Supporting Manhattan's Luxury Housing Bubble
Tyler Durden's
Tyler Durden on 02/07/2015 15:02 -0500
"Since the summer of 2012, the US housing market's latest (fourth) artificial dead cat bounce has ended with year over year prices once again declining, however one segment has continued to prosper:
the ultra-luxury, ultra-expensive top end of US real estate, located typically in San Francsico, Miami and, of course, New York.
The reason as we first noted, and explained, is that laundering of money into US real estate with the blessings of the NAR, the local authorities, regulators and of course Congress, has been one of the most critical pillars of the US "housing recovery" (the other three being Wall Street's creeping takeover of US rental assets, foreclosure stuffing and, of course, the Fed's trillions in MBS and TSY purchases).
As such, the US was willing to turn a blind eye to billions if not trillions in laundered, criminal, and in many cases "blood" dollars ending up on US shores, even if the source was the most loathsome of oligarchs or dictators, as long as it meant Obama could continue to take credit for the pretend housing "recovery."
"We kept repeating this over and over, and nobody really cared. After all exposing this little ploy would mean that there was no actual recovery, but merely the New Normal transformation of Swiss banking as the prefered venue where anonymous stolen, tax-evaded, oligarch money was parked, to duplex and triplex apartments on Park Avenue and Central Park West."
"Until now, when in a massive expose, the NYT has revealed - what all long-time Zero Hedge readers knew - namely that the "Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate", a long-overdue report on what really happens in the secret world of US ultra-luxury housing, and how the rush to bid up apartments in NYC to unprecedented levels, with some seeling for over $100 million, is not indicative of any recovery, but quite the opposite: the wealth transfer from the middle class to a select few oligarchs who do everything in their power to park and hide their money away from the public eye, and in many cases avoid taxation and explanation to their host nations just how they managed to procure such vast wealth without engaging in criminal activity. "
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-07/nyt-exposes-criminal-money-laundering-underworld-supporting-manhattans-luxury-housin
"Fascinating to note that the National Association of Realtors lobbied for and received a waiver from such regulation. That’s right, realtors actually went to the U.S. government and said: we want to be able to help foreign business oligarchs and other nefarious business people launder money through the real estate markets of the United States – and prevailed."
REFORM THAT SKELOS CUOMO!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-07/nyt-exposes-criminal-money-laundering-underworld-supporting-manhattans-luxury-housin
The NYT Exposes The Criminal Money-Laundering Underworld Supporting Manhattan's Luxury Housing Bubble
Tyler Durden on 02/07/2015 15:02 -0500
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