Michael
Milken, who went to prison in the early 1990s for violating securities
and tax laws, has worked to rebuild his reputation through the Milken
Institute.Credit...Lindsay Morris for The New York Times
RENO,
Nev. — In the 1980s, Michael Milken embodied Wall Street greed. A
swashbuckling financier, he was charged with playing a central role in a
vast insider-trading scheme and was sent to prison for violating federal securities and tax laws. He was an inspiration for the Gordon Gekko character in the film “Wall Street.”
Mr.
Milken has spent the intervening decades trying to rehabilitate his
reputation through an influential nonprofit think tank, the Milken
Institute, devoted to initiatives “that advance prosperity.”
These days, the Milken Institute is a leading proponent of a new federal tax break
that was intended to coax wealthy investors to plow money into
distressed communities known as “opportunity zones.” The institute’s
leaders have helped push senior officials in the Trump administration to
make the tax incentive more generous, even though it is under fire for
being slanted toward the wealthy.
Mr.
Milken, it turns out, is in a position to personally gain from some of
the changes that his institute has urged the Trump administration to
enact. In one case, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, directly
intervened in a way that benefited Mr. Milken, his longtime friend.
It is a vivid illustration of the power that Mr. Milken, who was barred from the securities industry and fined $600 million as part of his 1990 felony conviction,
has amassed in President Trump’s Washington. In addition to the
favorable tax-policy changes, some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers —
including Mr. Mnuchin, Jared Kushner and Rudolph W. Giuliani — have lobbied the president to pardon Mr. Milken for his crimes, or supported that effort, according to people familiar with the effort.
While the Milken Institute’s advocacy of opportunity zones is public, Mr. Milken’s financial stake in the outcome is not.
The
former “junk bond king” has investments in at least two major real
estate projects inside federally designated opportunity zones in Nevada,
near Mr. Milken’s Lake Tahoe vacation home, according to public records
reviewed by The New York Times.
One
of those developments, inside an industrial park, is a nearly 700-acre
site in which Mr. Milken is a major investor. Last year, after pressure
from Mr. Milken’s business partner and other landowners, the Treasury
Department ignored its own guidelines on how to select opportunity zones
and made the area eligible for the tax break, according to people
involved in the discussions and records reviewed by The Times.
The
unusual decision was made at the personal instruction of Mr. Mnuchin,
according to internal Treasury Department emails. It came shortly after
he had spent time with Mr. Milken at an event his institute hosted.
“People
were troubled,” said Annie Donovan, who previously ran the Treasury
office in charge of designating areas as opportunity zones. She and two
of her former colleagues said they were upset that the Treasury
secretary was intervening to bend rules, though they said they didn’t
realize at the time that Mr. Mnuchin’s friend stood to profit. The
agency’s employees, Ms. Donovan said, “were put in a position where they
had to compromise the integrity of the process.”
The
opportunity zone initiative, tucked into the tax cut bill that Mr.
Trump signed into law in 2017, has become one of the White House’s
signature initiatives. It allows investors to delay or avoid taxes on
capital gains by putting money in projects or companies in more than
8,700 federally designated opportunity zones. Mr. Trump has boasted that
it will revitalize downtrodden neighborhoods.
But
the incentive, also championed by some prominent Democrats, has been
dogged by criticism that it is a gift to wealthy investors and real
estate developers. From the start, the tax break targeted people with
capital gains, the vast majority of which are held by the very richest
investors. The Treasury permitted opportunity zones to encompass not only poor communities but some adjacent affluent neighborhoods.
Much of the money so far has flowed to those wealthier areas, including
many projects that were planned long before the new law was enacted.
Investors
and others — including Mr. Milken’s institute — have been pushing the
Treasury Department to write the rules governing opportunity zones in
ways that would make it easier to qualify for the tax break. That
campaign worked, and Mr. Milken is among the potential beneficiaries.
Geoffrey
Moore, a spokesman for Mr. Milken, confirmed that Mr. Milken had
investments inside opportunity zones, though they are a sliver of his
overall real estate holdings. He disputed that Mr. Milken had used his
institute or Washington connections to benefit his investments and said
no one at the institute “has any specific knowledge of Mike’s personal
investments.”
Mr. Moore added that Mr.
Milken’s support for opportunity zones was based on his longstanding
belief “that jobs and the democratization of ownership are the keys to
helping people in economically struggling areas.”
A
spokesman for the Milken Institute, Geoffrey Baum, said that “to
suggest that the work of the Milken Institute is motivated by or
connected to Mr. Milken’s investments is flat-out wrong.” He said the
institute advocated changes that were intended to spread the benefits to
more low-income communities, not to help the wealthy.
The White House declined to comment on whether Mr. Trump is considering a presidential pardon for Mr. Milken.
A Notorious Symbol
Image
Mr. Milken at the New York offices of Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1978.Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times
Mr.
Milken — operating from an X-shaped trading desk in Beverly Hills,
Calif. — was a Wall Street legend. He pioneered the junk bond, which
enabled financially risky companies to borrow billions of dollars and
ignited a wave of often-hostile corporate takeovers that came to define a
go-go era. His firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert, hosted an annual event,
which came to be known as the Predators’ Ball, where the era’s greatest
financiers mingled. Mr. Milken became a billionaire.
Then, in 1989, federal prosecutors charged him with violating securities and tax laws and with being part of a lucrative insider-trading ring. The next year, Drexel Burnham went bankrupt.
Mr. Milken pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 10 years in prison and paid $600 million in fines. After cooperating with the government, he ended up serving about two years behind bars.
Mr. Milken emerged with a considerable fortune intact. He invested in companies in for-profit education, health care and fast food,
according to securities filings and company announcements. He also
acquired lots of real estate, coming to own roughly 700 properties
around the United States, Mr. Moore said.
Image
Mr. Milken after a presentencing hearing in 1990.Credit...Mark Lennihan/Associated Press
He continued to attract scrutiny from regulators, including one case in which Mr. Milken paid $47 million
to resolve the Securities and Exchange Commission’s allegations that he
had violated his lifetime ban from the securities industry.
Mr.
Milken, however, has largely managed to restore his reputation — and
his clout. His family gave tens of millions of dollars to his Milken
Institute, which he founded in 1991 and whose board of directors he leads. After battling prostate cancer, he helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars to fund cancer research.
In Washington, Mr. Milken, 73, and his institute have courted influence, wooing and sometimes adding former federal officials. His family recently spent more than $85 million to buy threebuildings opposite the White House and the Treasury Department, which he is transforming into his institute’s new Washington offices.
The
most public display of his renewed stature comes each spring in Los
Angeles when Mr. Milken presides over a glitzy gathering at the Beverly
Hilton — the same venue where his famed Predators’ Balls took place
three decades ago.
The Milken
Institute’s annual conference attracts thousands of the world’s most
powerful people — from government, finance, medicine, Hollywood and the
like — for a frenzy of high-powered networking and conspicuous
consumption. Recent guests have included Leon Black, the chairman of
Apollo Global Management; David M. Solomon, the chief executive of
Goldman Sachs; Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; and
the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.
Mr.
Milken is the power broker at the center of the action. Onstage, he
interviews famous guests. In private, he organizes exclusive dinners.
Some have called the event the Davos of North America.
In
the Trump era, cabinet secretaries and White House advisers have been
among the event’s marquee guests, more so than in other recent
administrations. Coveted speaking roles have gone to Ivanka Trump and her husband, Mr. Kushner, giving them access to an elite audience.
Treasury
Secretary Steve Mnuchin arriving for the Milken Institute Global
Conference last year. He is a longtime friend of Mr. Milken.Credit...Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
At last year’s event in Beverly Hills, attendees included Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Mr. Mnuchin. The Treasury secretary was accompanied by several senior aides, including Daniel Kowalski, who is overseeing the department’s drafting of the opportunity zone rules.
Mr.
Kowalski, who has spent months drumming up support across the country
for opportunity zones, is well acquainted with the Milken Institute.
After
the tax incentive became law, it was up to the Treasury, and Mr.
Kowalski in particular, to put it in effect through a series of rules.
Officials at the Milken Institute met repeatedly with him to try to
influence that rule-writing process. The institute submitted a series of
letters and presentations to the Treasury and the Internal Revenue
Service, and at times directly to Mr. Mnuchin, pushing for rules that
would make the tax break easier to qualify for.
“Helping to shape the rules of the road” is how the Milken Institute describes its work on opportunity zones.
The
institute “is incredibly active,” Mr. Kowalski said in an interview. He
said he thought he had discussed opportunity zones with Mr. Milken,
although he said he could not specifically recall. He disputed that Mr.
Milken or his institute exerted any special influence over the Treasury
Department.
Image
Daniel
Kowalski, third from left, a senior aide to Mr. Mnuchin, spoke at an
opportunity-zones event in June. He oversaw the Treasury’s drafting of
rules for the zones.Credit...Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times
Among
the Milken Institute’s proposals was for the Treasury to give investors
a generous amount of time to build on opportunity zone land and to
reduce the amount that investors had to spend upgrading properties to be
eligible for the tax break. Those changes would make it easier for
investors to reap the benefits.
The
institute also asked the Treasury a question that would clarify if
investors who owned land in opportunity zones before the tax law was
passed were eligible to receive the benefits. The Treasury ruled that
such investments were permissible, a controversial decision since the
purpose of the opportunity zone initiative was to spur new investments,
not reward existing projects.
Mr.
Milken’s spokesman, Mr. Moore, said Mr. Milken “never attended any
meeting focused on opportunity zone regulations with any federal agency,
nor did he consult with any institute representatives who may have
interacted with any agency.”
But Aron
Betru, who led the Milken Institute’s opportunity zone efforts, told The
Times in an interview that he did discuss opportunity zones with Mr.
Milken, though he said he was not aware of Mr. Milken’s specific
investments. And in 2018 Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Milken attended a small,
private event, sponsored by the institute, to discuss opportunity zones.
Boomtown
Image
Mr.
Milken is an investor in 700 acres in an industrial park in Nevada. The
park didn’t qualify for opportunity zone status until Mr. Mnuchin told
Treasury officials that they should accept the nomination of the census
tract it is in.
Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times
High above Reno, on a vast hillside where wild horses roam, is the site of one of Nevada’s biggest opportunity zones.
The center of this area is known as Comstock Meadows, a reference to the 1859 discovery of the so-called Comstock Lode, one of the largest deposits of silver ever found in the United States. The find generated hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth, creating a boomtown in nearby Virginia City.
Today it is home to the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center.
Lured by cheap land, Google is building a huge new complex inside the
industrial park. Tesla and Switch, the data-center company, recently
opened their own operations. And down the street, Mr. Milken co-owns a
company that holds nearly 700 acres of empty land.
He and his partner — Chip Bowlby, president of a development company called Reno Land
— planned to use that space to open a so-called tech incubator, where
smaller companies could set up operations, among other possible uses.
Being
inside an opportunity zone would potentially be a huge boon for the
venture. It would mean that start-ups at the tech incubator could
attract tax-advantaged money from outside investors.
Nevada
officials wanted to nominate the census tract that included the
industrial park as an opportunity zone. But in early 2018, Treasury
officials had ruled that the area was ineligible because its residents
were too affluent.
Major landowners at
the site, including Mr. Bowlby, urged state and local officials to try
to get the Treasury to reverse that ruling, said Kris Thompson, the
project manager at the industrial center.
Storey County, where the industrial park is situated, deployed
Jon Porter, a former House Republican from Nevada who is now a
lobbyist, to push the matter. Dean Heller, at the time a Republican
senator, and Brian Sandoval, then the governor, also were enlisted and
had phone calls
with Mr. Mnuchin around that time, according to Treasury records. Mr.
Heller, Mr. Porter and Mr. Sandoval did not respond to requests for
comment.
‘My L.A. Friends’
Image
Mr. Milken at the Milken Institute Global Conference in April this year.Credit...Michael Kovac/Getty Images
Just as that lobbying intensified in the spring of 2018, Mr. Milken opened his institute’s annual conference in Beverly Hills.
Mr. Mnuchin was a featured guest. “It’s great to be here with you and all my L.A. friends,” the Treasury secretary said in an onstage interview on April 30.
That afternoon, the institute organized an invitation-only meeting with Mr. Mnuchin
and his staff to discuss opportunity zones. Other listed attendees
included Sean Parker, the former Facebook president and an early
advocate of opportunity zones, and Raymond J. McGuire, a top Citigroup
executive. Mr. Betru was the moderator.
Within
days, the Treasury Department had shifted its position and was now
willing to let the state nominate the area around the Nevada industrial
park as an opportunity zone.
Mr.
Mnuchin told Mr. Kowalski to inform other Treasury officials that they
should accept Storey County’s nomination, according to email records
reviewed by The Times.
Image
Mr. Mnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton, with Mr. Milken last year.Credit...Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan, via Getty Images
Mr.
Mnuchin spoke on the phone on May 8 with Mr. Sandoval. Forty-five
minutes later, Mr. Sandoval formally nominated the site to be part of an
opportunity zone, email records, including documents from Nevada, show.
And the decision was soon officially blessed by the Treasury Department. (While the Treasury’s reversal has been reported, Mr. Milken’s connection has not been previously disclosed.)
Treasury
officials said the change was part of an effort to iron out
inconsistencies in different Treasury rules. But the switch provoked
intense protests from Treasury and I.R.S. employees.
“Failure
to apply the designation standards equally across the board will call
into question the legitimacy of the process by which the designations
were made,” an unnamed I.R.S. employee wrote in an internal memo in May 2018.
It added that the appearance of “arbitrary” Treasury standards risked
“opening the door for accusations that the determination process was
influenced by political considerations or bias.”
“Any
such controversy would in turn taint the opportunity zones and
potentially chill or cloud the incentive for investors to invest in the
opportunity zones,” the memo said.
In
an interview this month at an event co-sponsored by the Milken Institute
in Jackson, Miss., Mr. Kowalski would not comment on whether Mr.
Mnuchin had been the driving force behind the Treasury’s reversal. “I
can certainly say he was apprised of the situation,” Mr. Kowalski said.
Brett
Theodos, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, which has advised
state governments including Nevada on their nominations of opportunity
zones, said the Treasury’s decision-making appeared problematic. “Making
exceptions for the politically connected is deeply troubling,” he said.
Spokesmen
for Mr. Milken and Mr. Mnuchin said the two men had never discussed the
Storey County issue. Mr. Mnuchin’s spokesman, Devin O’Malley, said Mr.
Mnuchin “had no knowledge of Milken’s investments in Nevada.”
Wins for Milken
Image
Mr. Milken is an investor in this housing, retail and hotel development being built in Reno. It’s in an opportunity zone.Credit...Tiffany Brown Anderson for The New York Times
In
August 2018, Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Milken met again. This time, the
occasion was a small conference hosted by the Milken Institute to
discuss opportunity zones. The event took place at the Hamptons home of
the real estate developer Richard LeFrak, a friend of and donor to Mr.
Trump, according to the event’s agenda.
A handout from the event, which was later posted online,
showed a map of all 8,764 opportunity zones in the United States, but
focused on the virtues of just one specific area: Reno. The handout
promoted the city as a “hub to the western United States.”
The
handout did not mention that Mr. Milken was a major investor in two
projects in opportunity zones in that area: the tech incubator in the
industrial park and a housing, hotel and retail development on the site of an old shopping mall in Reno.
As his institute was continuing to push the Treasury to tinker with its opportunity zone rules, Mr. Milken gave Mr. Mnuchin a flight in January on his private jet to Los Angeles, where both men have homes.
Three months later,
the Treasury Department heeded the institute’s request and clarified
that investors could receive the opportunity zone tax benefits by simply
leasing properties to themselves. As a result, investors who had long
owned land inside opportunity zones were now eligible for the tax break.
In
a separate round of rule changes, Treasury agreed to loosen rules
governing how quickly developers had to start work on opportunity zone
projects and how much money they had to spend — both revisions that the
Milken Institute, among many others, had sought.
This
was a potential win for Mr. Milken. His partner, Mr. Bowlby, had bought
the Nevada real estate — for both the tech incubator and the
residential and retail complex — before the areas were designated as
opportunity zones.
Mr.
Bowlby, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, said at a public
event this year that he was using a lease on his Reno project with Mr.
Milken “so we can still be qualified for the opportunity zone.”
The Treasury’s leasing decision has faced criticism.
“Anybody
who owned property in the zone prior to 2018 would have been out of
luck until these rules,” said Michelle Layser, a tax law professor at
the University of Illinois College of Law. “This really opens the door.”
Mr. Moore, the spokesman for Mr. Milken, denied that he received special treatment.
“Your
insinuation that Mike has reaped personal financial benefits from
Milken Institute programs is outrageous,” he said. “It’s clear that you
are less interested in the objective truth than in assigning to Mike
Milken sinister motives that simply do not exist.”
Mr.
Moore said that Mr. Milken hadn’t hidden the fact that he had
investments in the Nevada opportunity zones. He said Mr. Milken had
described them at the Hamptons event that Mr. Mnuchin attended. “There
was nothing secretive about it,” he said.
Mr.
Kowalski said he hadn’t been aware that Mr. Milken was an investor in
the Nevada projects at the same time that his institute was seeking to
change the rules governing opportunity zones.
Was he surprised? Mr. Kowalski paused. “Nothing surprises me anymore,” he said.
Reporting
was contributed by Alan Rappeport, Katie Rogers and Mark Walker from
Washington, and Weiyi Lim from Singapore. Kitty Bennett contributed
research.
A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Junk Bond King’ in Line To Profit From Tax Breaks. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
No comments:
Post a Comment