Taking Property Over in LLC for Anonymity Might Get Nixed
If you’re a corrupt foreign official or drug trafficker, there’s a pretty easy way to protect your illicit cash: create an anonymous shell company.
You form a shell company — meaning a business that exists only on paper, with no employees, no products it makes or sells, no revenue, nothing except maybe a bank account and some assets — but you do it without disclosing your (the owner’s) real name, offering a convenient way to launder your money and evade law enforcement in the United States.
Except that might now be a lot harder to do in the US. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the $741 billion defense bill, will effectively ban anonymous shell companies.
The NDAA passed with bipartisan support in Congress. Trump vetoed the package, but Congress voted overwhelmingly to override the president’s veto for the first time during Trump’s tenure.
That means that now, when someone opens a shell corporation, they’ll be required to provide the owner’s name and some basic identifying information. This simple step will give law enforcement and national security officials a powerful tool to crack down on corruption.
To help understand more about what this new provision does and why it’s so important, I called up Clark Gascoigne, a senior policy adviser at the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition, a nongovernmental organization that advocates against corrupt financial practices by promoting transparency and anti-money-laundering policies.
https://www.vox.com/22188223/congress-anti-money-laundering-anonymous-shell-companies-ban-defense-bill
That kinda sounds like Subject To. For sure. I am not positive if Shell Corporations are in the same running as personal independent folks that are acquiring properties on their own.