>> Two tax attorneys named by former President Bill Clinton as having influence over his decision to pardon Marc Rich charged the fugitive financier's lawyers $97,000 for an opinion that concluded Rich's companies committed no tax offenses, the Wall Street Journal reported. Rich's lawyers didn't disclose that the tax experts, Georgetown University Law Professor Martin Ginsburg and Harvard Law School Professor Bernard Wolfman had been paid for several
years of legal work, including their 1990 opinion that said Rich's companies were innocent of evading taxes on commodities transactions, the paper said. <<
These two prominent lawyers actually charged their very rich client for legal work!! This is what Bloomberg and the WSJ think is news?
And Rich's lawyers "didn't disclose" that the lawyers charged Rich for their legal work. Well, now, there's some major league deception the WSJ has ferreted out. Just think of the danger that someone might have imagined the two lawyers had done their work on a pro bono basis for Mr. Rich.
>> In a 1990 letter attached to the application, Wolfman
conceded that he and Ginsburg had made ``no independent
verification of the facts'' of the Rich case and that they were relying exclusively on information provided by Rich's lawyers, the paper said. <<
Of course the tax lawyers made no independent investigation of the facts. This is hardly news, or anything sinister. You hire expensive tax lawyers for an opinion on certain facts, not to increase the bill by "reinvestigating" the facts, and you give them a statement of the facts. The tax opinion letter would routinely (a) recite the facts given to the tax lawyers and relied on by them (b) make clear that if the facts were different than represented the opinion might well be different, and (c) go through the relevant analysis and state the conclusion that the subject transaction is not taxable, or satisfies the requirements of section XX of the Internal Revenue Code, or whatever. Absolutely routine professional transaction. |
