The opening sentence to a recent story in The Salt Lake Tribune was stark.
It read, “The overarching drive of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to keep the size and scope of its wealth hidden at all cost is now going to cost it.”
In a recently announced settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Utah-based church and its investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, have agreed to pay $5 million in penalties for failing to properly disclose past stock holdings and going to “great lengths” to deliberately “obscure” the church’s investment portfolio.
Joining State of Nevada host Joe Schoenmann to discuss the church’s settlement with the SEC is Tony Semerad. He covers real estate, growth and business for Tribune. He is a former editor and government reporter for the paper and has been with them since 1991, and he has been covering this story.
Reports have said the church, maybe the richest in the world, hid some $38 billion in investments in a variety of shell corporations.
So what does that revelation mean for the church? Or beyond that relatively small fine, will it mean anything? Tony Semerad has been covering the story for The Salt Lake Tribune.
Semerad said over the course of a number of years, the church, according to the SEC, sought to hide about $38 billion of investments in a series of public equities.
“It created as many as 13 of these limited liability corporations, according to the SEC, and used those LLCs then to report on its investments, while sort of keeping its hand in guiding those investments hidden,” he said.
A major takeaway of the church’s statement is essentially, they got bad legal advice.
“They also kind of reaffirm their commitment to comply with the law in a kind of a passive way, acknowledge and regret mistakes made,” he said. “They do appear to be attributing this to legal counsel, while the FCC documents make it clear that a lot of these moves required approval of senior church leadership and even the First Presidency at some stages.”
As for the church’s reputation, it’s mixed.
“We are hearing concern from Latter Day-saints about this, we're also hearing support for the church,” Semerad said. “An important point to parse here is that the church maintains that these are excess revenues from tithing, that this money isn't actually tithing itself, you know, any large amount of money even kept in a regular bank account is going to generate some return. And the church's insistence is that these are excess reserves. They've even called it a kind of a rainy day fund. And that the sort of sacred nature of tithing itself is not at stake here, that those funds are being kind of managed differently. But absolutely, we are hearing concern from members and you're seeing it on social media.”
Guest: Tony Semerad, real estate reporter, The Salt Lake Tribune
