[photo credit: Brigitte Stelzer -- NY Post]According to the Post article, Rangel, D-Harlem, has owned the property at the Punta Cana Yacht Club since 1988, but has not paid taxes on it.
A Post investigation into Punta Cana found that the sun-drenched beach front "casita" 412 was regularly rented out for up to $1,100 a day, yet Rangel had said he received no income in 2006, 2007 and other years. In other years, he had declared rental income of up to $15,000. He now admits that over 20 years he made at least $75,000 in rental income that he didn't report.
The chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee at first denied that he earned any money to a Post reporter, then said the whole thing was "a private matter." But now Rangel's lawyer says disclosure forms will be refiled for a number of years. Filing a false disclosure form can result in civil penalties and a possible five-year prison sentence.
His three-bedroom, three-bath villa, which can accommodate three couples, is rented for between $500 in the low season to $1,100 a night in the busiest tourist season and is one of the resort's most popular, managers and staff say.
Alerted to the Democratic Congressman's illegal activities, the New York Times has now uncovered the fact that Rangel failed to pay any interest on his loan on the Punta Cana resort property for more than ten years.
His loan originally called for an interest rate of 10.5%, with the loan to be paid off in its entirety in seven years. Within two years the interest on the loan was waived, and he did not finally pay off the loan until 2003.
Of interest to Ethics Committee investigators will be the fact that the principle owner of the resort development company that extended the sweetheart loan to the New York Democrat was Theodore Kheel. Kheel has been a huge contributor to Rep Rangel over his political career.
The loan was given to him by the resort development company, in which Theodore Kheel, a prominent New York labor lawyer, was a principal investor. Mr. Kheel, who has given tens of thousands of dollars to Mr. Rangel’s campaigns over the past decade, had encouraged the congressman to be one of the initial investors in the project.
The New York Democrat has hired former Clinton Administration mouthpiece Lanny Davis as his council on the matter, and to defend him into Ethics Committee investigations into his rent-controlled apartment in Harlem.
According to Davis, “Congressman Rangel is just learning about all of this now. He didn’t know how the loan was being paid or whether it was supposed to be reported as income. And until yesterday he thought he had been paying 10.5 percent interest.”
Davis claims that Rangel had no knowledge that he was breaking any laws, and had no idea that he was receiving a sweetheart deal. “It is important to note that Mr. Rangel neither received preferential treatment nor received any request from the owners of the resort — officially or unofficially.”
Rangel joins a long list of other Democratic leaders who have recently come under scrutiny for questionable loans or preferential treatment in their personal dealings with people and institutions over which they have governmental oversight or regulatory jurisdiction.
What I do find surpassingly interesting--in a snarky sort of way--is that every single one of these bozos, when caught, says "Gee, I had no idea what my mortgage rate was, or that I owed those taxes, or that I actually had to PAY any taxes on this income."
And these are the people who are in charge of billions or trillions of our dollars. Yeah, I know they know what they are supposed to pay and that they are just playing dumb to avoid being prosecuted--any way we can file charges for malfeasance, given that they are apparently too damned dumb to be able to do their jobs?