Robert Smith, an MBA from Columbia, agreed to pay the full load of 2019 graduate student debt to Morehouse College. Smith is reported under FBI and IRS investigation into a case stemming from his use of offshore tax havens.
Even as Robert F. Smith – the Columbia Business School MBA whose $ 5.2 billion value makes him the richest Black man in America – promised last year to pay the entire Morehouse College Class of tuike debt in an initial address to the HBCU in Atlanta, Georgia, he was under a Justice Department investigation into crimes stemming from his use of offshore tax havens, according to a Bloomberg report today (August 21).
Smith, founder of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which earned its CBS honors MBA in 1994, has spent four years under the control of the FBI and IRS. Bloomberg and other news reports, as authorities try to determine whether he failed to pay taxes on about $ 200 million in assets flowing through “offshore structures.” His gift to Morehouse, a historic college for black men he did not attend, was initially valued at about $ 10 million, although at the time Smith reported the college had pledged up to $ 40 million. Bloomberg reports that Smith’s total gift to Morehouse’s graduates and their families amounted to $ 34 million.
Bloomberg reports that the legal case “largely depends on whether Smith was in fact the beneficial owner of Caribbean entities that received proceeds from his first private equity fund in 2000”, adding that some of the proceeds “eventually went offshore Entities flocked to an American charitable foundation where Smith is president and founding director. “
NO COST FILED IN SMITH YET
The son of educators who began his career as a chemical engineer for Goodyear and Kraft, Smith used his MBA with a specialty in finance to move to Goldman Sachs before launching with San Francisco-based Vista Equity in 2000. The investment company builds with $ 65 billion in capital commitments and focuses on investing in software and technology-enabled companies.
The charitable foundation that conducts federal control is the Fund II Foundation, which has donated millions to such organizations as the United Negro College Fund and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Smith has not been charged in the case and it is possible that authorities will decide that he has not broken any laws, and that the proceeds in question always went to charity. The 57-year-old is trying to “convince the justice department to forget criminals and resolve his case with a civil settlement,” Bloomberg reports, because a conviction can mean imprisonment if relinquishing his position in Vista Equity, or both.
Bloomberg reports that the investigation was not made public until a February hearing in Bermuda, when a Justice Department spokesman said prosecutors thought $ 1.5 billion in revenue was hidden from the U.S. government – a “record-setting” amount.
‘The opportunity you reach should be determined by the ability of your intelligence’
Speaking to more than 300 Morehouse students in May of last year, Smith quoted Martin Luther King Jr. as saying. and encourage students to use “creativity” and “grit” in their future endeavors.
“My family will create a subsidy to eliminate your student loans,” Smith told her. ‘Your great Morehouse men are bound only by the limits of your own conviction and creativity. When Dr. King said that the ‘bow of the moral universe bends to justice’, he did not say that it bends at will. It bends because we choose to put our shoulders in it and press it.
‘Where you live should not determine when you get an education. Where you go to school should not determine when you get textbooks. The chances of you gaining access should be determined by the ingenuity of your intellect, the courage in your creativity and the desire to overcome your expectations that are not set high enough. “
Prior to Smith’s Morehouse announcement, he donated $ 1.5 million to Morehouse for scholarships and the development of a new park. In 2016, he planned $ 50 million at Cornell University, one of his alma mater, to support her chemical and biomolecular engineering school, as well as students for black and female engineers. Three years ago, he signed the Giving Pledge, an attempt at the battle by billionaires Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates to persuade wealthy Americans to give half of their fortunes. He is also one of the founding donors of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, and allocates $ 20 million to the museum before it opens.
MISS THIS COLUMBIA MBA IS SO FULL NOTHING HAS HE PAID ALL THE STUDENT DEBT FROM THIS COLLEGE CLASS
