The Jacksonville Jaguars are being sold. Long-time owner Wayne Weaver is selling his franchise to one Shahid Khan, should NFL owners approve.
Who is Shahid Khan? Well, he tried to buy the St. Louis Rams a couple of years back after Georgia Frontiere died, but it turns out that he was a huge tax cheat:
Khan is one of hundreds of wealthy taxpayers whom the IRS has targeted in recent years for allegedly sheltering hundreds of millions of dollars by using complex financial transactions that were hard to detect on tax returns. The transactions were created by lawyers, bankers and accountants, some of whom have been prosecuted for fraud and gone to prison…
The IRS said in court papers that the Khans hired the Chicago-based BDO Seidman accounting firm and met with tax partner Robert Greisman. The Khans engaged in at least five questionable tax shelters, with names like Son-of-Boss and Dad, and paid BDO $8.5 million in fees, about 10 percent of the alleged tax savings, according to court documents…Yet when the revenue agency questioned Khan about his returns, he was unable to identify what services BDO provided, an IRS agent said in court documents.
And, from Forbes, here’s a description of the tax schemes Khan employed:
Khan used three Son of Boss shelters, which generally cook up phony losses using foreign currency options, and two Distressed Asset/Debt (dad) shelters, in which troubled securities are bought for pennies on the dollar and then written off at their original full value.
That’s how the 1%’ers get away with this crap.
The NFL should not approve this purchase. What kind of message does it send to its fan base when a guy who tried to cheat the Feds out of $85 mill is allowed to buy a team?
Of course, the NFL is full of guys like that. So, I imagine that Wayne Weaver’s words will rule the day:
“This gentleman is absolutely the American story,” Weaver said of Khan.
In the America of 2011, he certainly is.