Olen Properties

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Olen Properties Corp. is a US real estate company based in Newport Beach , California .

Companies

The real estate development company was founded in 1973 and has a portfolio of approximately 11,000 apartments and land for industrial and commercial properties equivalent to almost half a million square meters (approximately 6 million square feet) in more than three dozen cities, especially in Southern California and in space Las Vegas . The business activities are divided into the departments California Commercial, Arizona Residential, Nevada Residential and Florida Residential. Sales in 2006 were $ 286 million.

Igor Olenicoff

The founder and CEO is the billionaire Igor M. Olenicoff, born on September 19, 1942 in the Iranian province of Māzandarān . Shortly after his birth, the Olenicoff family, associated with the regime of Tsar Nicholas II , fled from the communist revolutionaries to Iran . After its occupation by Russia ( Iranian Soviet Republic ), they emigrated to the USA in 1957, practically penniless. Igor Olenicoff, then 15 years old, was later naturalized . He attended a mission school and was fluent in English, Russian and Farsi . He then graduated from the University of Southern California . He holds bachelor's degrees in business administration and engineering, an MBA in finance and a master's degree in quantitative analysis. He then worked for Shell Oil Co. , Touche Ross and Motown Records . He was a founding partner of real estate firm Gemini Pacific and a vice president of Dunn Properties before founding his own company, Olen Properties, in 1973. Today Olenicoff resides in Florida (the state does not levy income tax ), but according to research by the tax authorities in California. He is married and had a son († 2005) and a daughter with his wife. He was ranked 618 worldwide on Forbes Magazine's 2007 billionaires list with an estimated fortune of 1.6 billion US dollars, and 286 on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans.

Tax evasion proceedings

Multiple allegations of tax evasion have been made against the company or its owner:

After the Internal Revenue Service initially demanded $ 148 million in tax reclaims and fines for the period 1994-1996, Olen Properties finally paid $ 272,024 in 2004 to end the process.

In 2002, Olenicoff reported to the tax authorities that between 1992 and 1997, his companies earned only $ 15,000 in income. After the tax authorities opened a new case against him in a federal court in California, he testified extensively in order to avoid imminent jail time. It was one of the largest individual tax proceedings in Southern California's history. As a result, in December 2007, a settlement was reached with the US Department of Justice, in the context of which he paid 52 million US dollars (33 million euros) for evaded taxes, fines and interest on arrears and promised to bring all of his financial investments to the USA . At the beginning of 2008 he pleaded guilty to the settlement between 1998 and 2004 through a network of offshore accounts with banks in the tax havens of Switzerland (UBS), Liechtenstein (New Haven Trust), Bahamas and England to have hidden from the tax authorities. On April 14, 2008, he was sentenced to two years suspended prison sentence and 120 hours of social work and a personal fine of US $ 3,500 for false tax information. Nevertheless, he denied that the overseas accounts were attributable to him. Since 1980, Olen would have been owned by an offshore company based in the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and currently Denmark. The Bahamas-based Sovereign Bancorp Ltd, which controls its overseas bank accounts, is said to have been founded by former Russian President Boris Yeltsin's investment company Vozrozhdeniye [Renaissance] Fund, according to Olenicoff .

Investigations against UBS employees and Liechtenstein trustees

In connection with this process, however identify one another, the US Justice Department and the US Financial Supervisory Authority SEC and brought charges against the head of the dissolved in November Wealth Management International teams of the Swiss bank UBS and a financial advisor from Liechtenstein on suspicion that they in Tax evasion has helped, even though the banks in Switzerland committed themselves in a 2002 agreement (Qualified Intermediary Agreement) with the USA to report all transactions by US citizens with US securities to the tax authorities. At the end of April 2008, the authorities questioned the head of the private equity division North and South America at UBS. The Liechtenstein financial advisor was put out to be wanted. Against the background of the Liechtenstein tax affair in Germany, effects of the US investigations on Swiss banking secrecy are believed to be possible.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Orange County Business Journal , Nov. 14-20 . May 2007
  2. ↑ All biographical information according to: Mark Mueller: Igor Michael Olenicoff. In: Orange County Business Journal , Apr. 27, 2009, Vol. 32, Issue 17, p. 37.
  3. ^ The Billionaire With The Empty Pockets , Forbes Magazine, September 10, 2006
  4. ↑ Billionaire pays IRS $ 52 million in back taxes , The Orange County Register, December 12, 2007
  5. ↑ Billionaire used Bahamas to avoid taxes ( Memento of the original from May 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , The Jamaica Observer, January 4, 2008  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.jamaicaobserver.com
  6. ↑ boerse-express.com , June 2, 2008
  7. ↑ UBS seeks deal with US authorities , hossli.com, June 1, 2008
  8. ↑ US tax authorities want to uncover UBS tricks ( Memento from May 19, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Tagesanzeiger, May 14, 2008
  9. ↑ USA are searching for Liechtenstein residents  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Wirtschaft regional - business newspaper for the Liechtenstein-Rheintal-Sargans region, May 24, 2008@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.vaterland.li  
  10. ↑ A touchstone for banking secrecy , NZZ, May 31, 2008