After appointed as Georgia Senator, Kelly Loeffler bought a $10M jet to fly back & forth from GA & DC?

Yes, that’s 100% TRUE.

She used Trump’s 2017 tax cuts “loophole” to purchase a 2010 Bombardier Challenger 300 and claims she uses it for campaign travel.

While it’s unclear exactly how much she paid for the jet, which seats 8 passengers and can travel 3000 nautical miles, essentially coast-to-coast on one fill-up, an online listing of other such jets for the same year, make, and model, in an online listing shows $9.7 million to be an average asking price.

Kelly Loeffler’s Bombardier jet N830EC

Trump’s tax cuts essentially made private jets flying tax shelters for the wealthy. Under his changes, the entire purchase price of a new or used aircraft bought by a company can be a 100% tax deductible write-off against its earnings.

What the multi-millionairess did, was to create an “ownership trust” which is a company that owns the plane, rather than herself personally. By so doing, it offers some degree of anonymity by giving it the appearance of isolation from the individuals whom actually control it. Essentially, it’s a type of “shell company” set up exclusively for the purpose of ownership, and nothing else. It’s greatest single benefit? It helps avoid taxes.

Shell companies, while not illegal, per se, and can have legitimate uses, often deliberately “fly under the radar” to avoid payment of taxes, or for money laundering purposes, and are registered in the names of the attorneys or accountants who manage them, thus avoiding any readily identifiable connection with the person who truly owns it or benefits from it. Most often, shell companies are incorporated in nations with tax laws favorable to them, aka “tax havens,” which by law do not have to report income such as in Cayman Islands, Seychelles, Panama, Switzerland, Hong Kong and Belize, or other island or “offshore” nations.

The so-called “Panama Papers,” also sometimes called the “Mossack Fonseca papers” for the name of the obscure Panamanian law firm from which they were obtained, is a collection of well over 11.5 million documents identifying 214,488 entities and shell corporations, their owners, lawyers, and the often-illegal network established to manage them, which were made public in 2016.

Each aircraft has a registration number, often called a “tail number,” which is like an automobile license plate, or VIN, because it identifies an aircraft uniquely from among all other aircraft, under a system managed by the Federal Aviation Administration, and used in other nations. But unlike cars’ license plates which require regular periodic renewal (license plates essentially prove a tax has been paid), the tail number stays with the aircraft permanently, and is never reassigned to any other aircraft. So when a plane is sold, retired, or crashes, the number always accompanies the craft to identify it, regardless of its disposition.

N830EC, Kelly Loeffler’s Bombardier model BD-100-1A10 jet

There are some limitations on registration of aircraft in the United States to foreign individuals and/or corporations, however, which is to say, that unlike ocean-going vessels such as cruise ships, or cargo ships, under United States law, aircraft which are either majority or fully owned by foreign individuals or interests cannot be registered in the United States to be assigned a “N number,” aka “tail number.” An overview of the requirements and limitations can be found on the Federal Aviation Administration’s website here: https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certification/aircraft_registry/register_aircraft/.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requires shell companies to register with them, and Loeffler’s aircraft – N830EC (FAA registry page here: https://registry.faa.gov/AircraftInquiry/Search/NNumberResult?nNumberTxt=830EC) – is registered to TVPX Aircraft Solutions, Inc., 39 E Eagle Ridge Dr., Ste. 201, North Salt Lake, Utah 84054-2533, United States. TVPX states this about Aircraft Registration and Aviation Trust Services on their site:

“TVPX Trust Services provides customized FAA owner trust services for aircraft owners, including those individuals and businesses that do not qualify as US citizens for FAA registration purposes under the FAA’s complex citizenship rules. TVPX Aircraft Registration Service LLC and its 100% owned subsidiaries, TVPX Aircraft Solutions Inc. and TVPX ARS Inc. provide trust services for US aircraft registration purposes. Under FAA rules, individuals who are not US citizens and businesses established outside the US may not own and register aircraft in the US. US law allows non-qualifying individuals and entities to form trusts with US citizen trustees who then hold legal title to and register the aircraft on behalf of the non-US citizen owner.US citizens can also take advantage of the FAA owner trust structure for other various reasons. These can include anonymity, sales facilitation, and loan and lease structuring.”

By law (Federal Regulations 14 CFR 91.225 and 14 CFR 91.227), aircraft are outfitted with ADS-B radio transponders (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast), which transmit real-time information including the aircraft ID, GPS position, and altitude via radio signals, providing information to and from the pilot and air traffic flight control even when the aircraft is out of view of radar. The transponder units also provide flight-related weather data, and are used to improve safety and efficiency in navigation, and represent a significant improvement in air travel safety.

Each craft’s radio transmissions are received by civilian ADS-B receivers located in the aircraft’s proximity. ADS-B receivers directly receive the radio signals from flights that are within range of their position, and the data contained in the signals is sent to a central server which aggregates feeds from the numerous individual receivers globally. ADS-B operates on a somewhat similar principle as a cellular network insofar as most towers have overlapping coverage areas with other towers, and depending upon where a cellular phone is located, the information is shared between adjacent towers in the network to establish communication. A map of ADS-B locations, and coverage area may be found on the FlightAware site.

While the exceedingly vast majority of aircraft allow themselves to be “tracked,” per se, by public services which use public information accompanying each aircraft, such as by FlightAware for example, there are a few that do not. Loeffler’s aircraft – N830EC – is one that does not.

Loeffler, aged 49, is worth an estimated $500 million, married to Jeffrey Sprecher, aged 65, who is Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange – the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange – and according to conservative estimates by Forbes, they have a combined net worth of at least $800 million, and quite possibly $1 Billion. She is by far, the wealthiest Member of Congress.

President Trump was irritated when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp appointed Kelly Loeffler to serve the remainder of Senator Johnny Isakson’s uncompleted term following his resignation after diagnosis with Parkinson’s Disease, and preferred that vocal Trump supporter Representative Doug Collins (R-27), be named to the temporary position. Collins decided to leave his House position to campaign against Loeffler for election to the Senate seat, and was defeated, while Loeffler will face Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock in a runoff special election in January.

Professionally, after earning her MBA from Chicago’s DePaul University, she cut her business teeth at Toyota, Citi, and William Blair & Company Global Banking and Asset Management, before joining Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in 2002. She married ICE Founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board Jeffrey Sprecher two years later.

Before being named to the interim Senate position by Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, Loeffler, who is by far the wealthiest member of Congress, was the Chief Communications and Marketing Officer for Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), where she helped market a new program called ICE Clear Credit, which is a credit default swap (CDS) clearinghouse, that included a Cayman Islands corporation, to allow its clients, including some of the biggest banks in the world, to dodge U.S. taxes.

I have written extensively on Credit Default Swaps and the role they played in the American banking crisis, and subsequent “Great Recession” which occurred from January 2008 of the George W. Bush administration, and through June 2009 of the subsequent Obama administration. Those articles from 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2020, may be read here, here, here, here, and here. Recall also what German Chancellor Minister Angela Merkel succinctly and bluntly said when she defined and condemned Credit Default Swaps in one fell swoop in the Goldman-Sachs American-caused Greek financial collapse in March 2010:

“Credit-default swaps – where you insure your neighbor’s house just to destroy it and make money from it – that’s exactly what we have to curb.”

Loeffler is originally from Illinois, and as a former asset management executive, seems to have joined the Wall Street money managers’ “feeding frenzy” who jumped at a provision in Trump’s 2017 tax bill that turned private jets into high-flying tax shelters.

Buried in that bill was a provision that permits a company to write off the full price of a new or used airplane against the company’s earnings. It’s unknown how much Loeffler paid for the 2010 Bombardier Challenger 300 jet that she has used for campaign travel, but an online listing asks $9.7 million for the same make, model, and year.

The law doesn’t allow individuals to write off the purchase of a jet, only companies can. And the ownership arrangement for that particular jet is doubtlessly purposely opaque. For example, Loeffler and Sprecher together chartered the plane under a company called TVPX Aircraft Solutions, which provides an “owner trust” which, among other things, offers anonymity. According the aircraft tracking site Flight Aware, that airplane is “not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator.”

Regarding Kelly Loeffler’s required Federal financial disclosures for the jet, its value ranges from $5 million to $25 million, and indicates that it’s jointly owned by Loeffler and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, Chairman of the Board of the New York Stock Exchange.

Last February (2020), an aide to Loeffler told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Loeffler had paid for the airplane “out of her pocket,” but her Federally-required disclosures suggest that’s not true.

A Federal Aviation Administration lookup for a mandatory two-year regulatory test shows that the jet’s operator is not listed as an individual, but as a company, Descante Capital Holdings.

Loeffler’s financial disclosures list several versions of Descante Capital LLC companies, which serve as holding companies for her primary residence, “Descante,” an extravagant 15,000 square foot $10.5 million Atlanta mansion. However, those disclosures do not list a company called Descante Capital Holdings.