As we wait for the South Dakota Division of Banking to determine whether Joop Bollen should have been paying bank franchise tax on the money he made fleecing foreign investors, an eager reader finds a hint that Bollen's boon companion James Park may also have been evading bank franchise tax.
Before Northern Beef Packers, the Veblen dairies were the biggest project in South Dakota's EB-5 program. The Veblen dairies received $13.5 million in EB-5 investment from 27 Korean investors before violating South Dakota environmental rules and going bankrupt in 2010.
Among the creditors listed on the Veblen East Dairy list of unsecured claims was Park's firm Hanul Professional Law Corporation, which claimed to have loaned Veblen East $2 million. Mikkel Pates reported that Hanul had $2.45 million in claims against the associated Dairy Dozen Veblen LLP but received only $248 in the bankruptcy settlement.
Hmm... so Hanul was a law firm, but they were lending at least $2 million to the Veblen dairies. As with Bollen's EB-5 shop SDRC Inc., Hanul appears neither to have obtained a lending license nor paid bank franchise tax on any proceeds from loans nor even an official exemption like the one the Banking Commission granted to shady offshore lender Epoch Star to save Northern Beef Packers.
The more we investigate South Dakota's EB-5 program, the more we find EB-5 players Joop Bollen and James Park trying to avoid the rules by which honest South Dakotans play.
I imagine that the state will go after the taxes based on their auditing of other people for sales tax receipts and with the coming downturn in the ag economy because of lower crop prices it is going to get tight in Pierre for budgeting once again. Oh that's right it never happened the other time; despite the 'chicken little' move by Dennis.
Loan sharking is just another arm of the criminal enterprise of Rounds and Daugaard. As we drift further and further from law and order, we need to decide if we all want to be involved with that lifestyle or we want to change it.
Somewhere along the line, you know that this bunch got a huge tax write off for this planned disaster.
And this a surprise because?...this is another layer of cocky deceit. Don't they call this racketeering? These guys really went to town on these investments.