Alan Mollohan: Congressman and Real Estate GuruYou there, at home. How would you like to take $25,000 and leverage it into a multimillion dollar share of a condominium complex in just ten years? Or to put it another way, how would you like to see a 9,000 percent appreciation on your investment in just four years? Well, if you follow the example of Rep. Allan Mollohan (D-WV), your dream can come true.
Here’s your road map. It’s a chronology of Mollohan’s real estate investments, which he released yesterday as part of his effort to prove that he’s got nothing to hide. In early April, you may remember, news broke that Mollohan was under investigation by the FBI for his investments and earmarking activity.
A big part of the complaint by the conservative National Legal and Policy Center that triggered the investigation was the allegation that Mollohan had tried to hide his vast increase in wealth by failing to properly disclose his real estate investments. So Mollohan, in anticipation of releasing his disclosure tomorrow, made some relatively minor corrections to his past disclosures and included a timeline of his past real estate investments. Hey, Mollohan’s saying, I got rich the honest way. Or as he puts it:
… we received a sizable inheritance, took on considerable financial risks, and had the good fortune to be investing in a rising real estate market. It is those factors that are responsible for the increase of our assets.
I assume that Mollohan employs a squad of accountants, because whenever I sit down to review his investments, it sets my head spinning. Like his earmarking activities, nothing’s simple.
Mollohan has partnered 50-50 with a number of people, all of them in some way beneificiaries from his earmarks, on a number of different real estate investments. That, in and of itself, is an ethics no-no - and Mollohan admitted as much when he said he’d exhibited an ethical “blind spot.”
But blind spot or not, Mollohan says that the money’s clean. Eventually the FBI, which has been busily issuing subpoenas in the investigation, will have its own say on that.
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