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